Quick Solution: Follow other instructions on the Internet, but make sure that your Mac’s Ethernet address is manually set to “192.168.2.1″ with a subnet mask of “255.255.255.0″.

The Whole Story

So I finally upgraded the router in my home to wireless.  I am too cheap to buy the wireless ethernet card for the Xbox (it’s about $50), and since my Mac (13″ Macbook, the Aluminum series) has both wireless and wired ethernet cards (all Mac laptops do), I figured I could save some money by using my Mac to connect my Xbox to my wireless router.  People have been doing this for a while; I didn’t come up with that brilliant idea, I just wanted to make it happen for me.

… pause for a few.  I will update this later.

23May2009 – actually, it seems that I have forgotten to update this.  Well, the quick solution is the key point, so if you check out other tutorials, add my quick solution to the things you try before you give up.

Quick Answer: Still working on it…

The Whole Story

I have been using Parallels Desktop for Mac version 3.x, but recently upgraded to Parallels Desktop for Mac version 4.x.  Apparantly one of the features as of an update to version 3 (but still version 3) is that you can now use a Boot Camp install of Windows in Parallels.  (Previously, you could only use Boot Camp or Parallels, unless you wanted to run two separate installs of Windows)

In order to get the absolute full utlility and performance out of my Macbook (the all aluminum model purchased in late 2008, 2.4 GHz, 2G RAM, 256 VRAM) in order to play the newer games (and do work?), I want to move my current installation of Windows XP from a Parallels Virtual Machine to a Boot Camp install (a partitioned section of my hard drive).

Method to be attempted

I did a bit of searching and found a thread on the Parallels forums.  I found a post that gives to methods to moving a Virtual Machine to Boot Camp.  The first method is long (about 40+ steps), but the second (written by a Parallels affiliate) is shorter:

Username Eru Ithildur wrote:

Here is a much less extensive list (Geez bps1, you’ve got us beat!), but it might work:

1. Un-install Parallels tools.
2. Download Acronis to your VM.
3. Back-up your VM with Acronis to an external.
4. Download BootCamp.
5. Install BootCamp with Windows XP SP2 and the BootCamp tools per the instructions on Apple’s site.
6. Restore your Acronis image to BootCamp. (Your old data should now be there)
7. Create a new VM, use the Advanced configuration and BootCamp as a harddrive.
8. Boot into your new VM and install Parallels tools.

__________________
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Consulting Available – Contact me via e-mail for more details.

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XServe Xeon – 2×2 @ 2 GHz – 5 GB RAM – 750 GB 7200 RPM HD
15″ MacBook Pro – 2.33 GHz – 2 GB RAM – 120 GB HD – 256 MB Graphics

So this is the method that I will attempt.

Materials You Will Need

• Windows XP SP2 install disk
• Acronis (this software is included for free if you buy Parallels 4.x)
• Boot Camp Assistant (I am running Leopard, 10.5.6 and it was already installed)
• External hard drive (with enough space for your current Parallels Virtual Machine installation)

On the next page, I will continue the story and show the problems I ran into and what I did to fix them.

Background

I use a Mac because it is much more stable than Windows.  Also, the open source community is well plugged into working with Macintosh, from what I can tell.

I usually don’t buy software, because in most cases a group of people have come up with a better, free and open source, solution.

I decided to shell out the $79 (which is a bargin) for Apple’s iWork ’08 because I hate using Microsoft Word for Mac, and I am not too fond of NeoOffice (I like the native feel of the iWork’s GUI, which is also found in software like OmniGraffle and Navicat).  As many others have pointed out, Keynote is great, and Pages is pretty good.

Why am I frustrated

I am frustrated because Numbers is slow and lacking in functionality.  I understand that it is only at Version 1.0.2 (at the time of this writing), but I still want more.

I am not trying to do anything fancy, just paste a few hundred cells of data and get some graphs.  Every time I try to do something with a graph, my CPU usage skyrockets and it takes me about 5 minutes to do something as simple as add another column of data to a chart.

I can live without some of the functionality found in Excel, because I don’t need most of the fancy statistical analysis every day.  What I do need is for Numbers to do what it can, well.

My recommendation to the developers (I know that they read this site nearly every day… [sarcasm]) is to tone down the CPU heavy graphical data selection, and just give me a text or simple menu way of manipulating graphs and charts.  Some added flexability with chart making would also greatly enhance the Numbers experience. For example, why is it so hard to get x-axis labels?  And why, if I do it wrong the first time, must I re-create the chart from scratch to get it to work properly?

At this stage in its life, Numbers seems to be working against the current Mac mantra: “Easy and intuitive”.

Begging the Developers

Please, if you can hear me, fix Numbers so that I can use it without pulling out my hair.  Until then, I will be running Software Update every hour…. hoping…

How about you? If you have this problem, please let me know about it so that I can feel better.

Quick Solution: Even if your username includes a mix of capital and lowercase letters, you should use all lowercase when using terminal.

The Whole Story

Not much to it: I was trying to ssh (Secure Shell) into my Ubuntu Linux box from Mac OS X Leopard, but was having some problems.

Install SSH on Ubuntu

1. Open Synaptic Package Manager.
2. Install ssh and openssh-server
   
   
   

Your Ubuntu may need to restart, and after it does, your ssh service should be running.

Log into Ubuntu with ssh

Using a terminal on another computer that is networked to the Ubuntu box, type ssh user@host, where user is your username on the Ubuntu box, and host is the ip address of the Ubuntu box.

My problem is that my username on my Ubuntu box included both upper and lower case letters, so I was typing my username with upper and lower case. Only use lowercase letters.

The server will then ask for your password. This is the password for the username on your Ubuntu box.

If you type in the correct password, it should log your in.

Quick Solution: Use Disk Utility to Restore your old drive to your new drive, then tell Time Machine that you want to use a different disk

The Whole Story

When I got the 1TB drive, it was formatted as FAT32. I had been using Time Machine (I am running Mac OS 10.5.2) and I wanted to use my new drive for Time Machine, but I wanted to keep my current Time Machine history. My vision was to have the exact same data, but now my external drive can hold more. I ran into a few issues while trying to do this, so here is how I solved them.

Note: The sections “Formatting the new hard drive”, “Transfer the files”, and “Transfer Problems” narrate the problems I had while trying to just copy files… see the following section, “Use Disk Utility Instead”, for enumerated instructions on how I actually solved the problem.

Formatting the new hard drive

When I first plugged in the drive, Leopard recognized it. I thought that I might just be able to dump the files from my old external hard drive (formatted in HFS+) onto the new one (FAT32). When I selected the files to move and dragged them to the new folder, I heard the “pang” sound that Finder makes when you copy files, but nothing actually happened.

Since I will only use this new drive on a Mac, I thought maybe I should reformat to HFS+ (I also thought that Time Machine might require it). Using Disk Utility, I ran into a few vague errors and the disk would never be successfully formatted. I found the solution on the Apple Discussion Forums .

This basically says that you must select the highest parent of the drive you want to format

and select the “Partition” page.

Then go to “Options…” and select the top option: “GUID”.

The formatting should only take a few seconds.

The next page goes over transferring your files.

Symptoms

• You just installed GlowWorm.app
• Your computer will not boot (or not reach the login window, but the mouse appears) in normal mode
  • You can boot into safe mode
  • You can boot into single user mode

The quick answer: boot into “safe mode” and run the GlowWorm unistaller.app and disable firewall; reboot.

Problem Summary

After installing GlowWorm.app from the Apple Downloads page, my MacBook would not boot, or it would boot up to the blue screen that appears just before the login window (when the mouse appears), but no login window would appear.

The Whole Story

I was browsing Apple’s Downloads and downloaded a program called GlowWorm FW Lite. After I installed it (and during which it required my admin password) I think I started to run it. GlowWorm.app told me that there was an update and I think that I told it to upgrade. There was some popup that asked if I wanted to allow something to accept incoming connections… but I said “Deny”. For some reason (not sure if it was related to GlowWorm), I had to restart my computer. When my MacBook started to boot, it got as far the blue screen where the mouse appears. The next thing that I expected was the login window, but it never came.

I tried all of the things you can do according to the Apple Support Page (tried again, reset PRAM, selected a startup disk, etc) to no avail. I was able to boot into Safe Mode (hold shift as the computer is turned on and hold until the apple logo appears and the progress wheel starts spinning) and backup my documents. While in safe mode, I deleted GlowWorm.app to the trash and then emptied the trash. I used spotlight to look for any files called glowworm, but there were no results so I restarted.Same problem.So I went back into safe mode and looked where another Apple support article suggested that there might be a problem,

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle

but there was nothing in that folder.

I remembered that earlier I was asked to either Allow or Deny something to accept incoming connections, so I opened up my System Preferences -> Security -> Firewall. At the bottom of my “Set access for specific services and applications” list, I found that service (I don’t remember what it was, but it did start with a “Q”) and took it off of the list. Because Safe Mode takes forever to boot, to be safe I also disabled the firewall by selecting the “Allow all incoming connections” radio button.

Then I thought it was odd that the GlowWorm.app didn’t have any support files when I looked earlier. It turns out, there is an app called uninstall.app located in

/Library/Application Support/glowworm/utilities/

I ran that and the traces of GlowWorm appeared to be gone. I rebooted and this time the login window appeared.

As I mentioned, I changed a few things before rebooting (firewall settings and installing), so I am not sure what the actual problem was, only that what I did seemed to fix the problem. Normally I might try to reproduce this error, but I don’t feel like flirting with the kind of danger that prevents my mac from booting.

1. “The help system cannot be launched because the help folder is missing. Please install the help folder or reinstall Dreamweaver” error message OR
2. nothing happens when you launch help from one of the apps (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, etc)

I installed Adobe Web Premium CS3 on my computer, and in the applications folder were placed 7 or so icons all starting with “Adobe…” Most of these items weren’t even applications or aliases to such, they were just folders, so I had an extra mouse click (plus more searching) to launch one of these apps. So I created a folder called “Adobe” in my applications folder, stuck all of these adobe folders and files in there, and then made aliases for each of the applications and stuck those in the applications folder.

Each time I would launch one of these apps for the first time, I would get a message that said “Application has moved This application has been moved from the location in which it was originally installed. Some settings need to be repaired.” Each time I clicked Repair Now.

The apps seemed to work fine, until I tried to open Dreamweaver help, either from the help menu:

I would get this error: “The help system cannot be launched because the help folder is missing. Please install the help folder or reinstall Dreamweaver”. In Fireworks, I wouldn’t even get an error message, nothing would happen.

I tried launching from the .app instead of the alias (just to dummy check), and got the same error. I also searched for “help” within the Adobe file I made, and found a folder called help. This was buried way deep, so I didn’t want to mess with that if I could find another way.

To check, I remembered that there are .apps just for help in the adobe suite. The first thing that I noticed was that there are 2 of them: Adobe Help Viewer 1.0.app and Adobe Help Viewer 1.1.app. Openeing Help Viewer 1.0.app seemed to only have help for Adobe Viewer and Pro.

But Help Viewer1.1.app had the rest of the suite.

I also think I remembered that when you ask for help from one of the apps (Fireworks, Dreamweaver, etc) that it just opens the Help Viewer 1.1.app.

So if the application doesn’t know where it is, I thought about where a newly installed Adobe Application would think to find Help Viewer 1.1.app. If you notice in the screen shots of my applications folder, you can see that I happen to have a copy of Help Viewer 1.0.app in both my Applications folder and my Applications/Adobe folder.

So, the fix was to copy the Help Viewer 1.1.app in to the Applications folder. You don’t even have to restart your Dreamweaver.