Much like the tendrals, this was slightly dissappointing since I’d wanted to see double digits. The other interesting numbers…

• Mac up 9.63% to 9.93%
• iPhone almost half a percent, up 0.44% to 0.48%
• Linux down 0.85% to 0.83%, probably since there wasn’t much Linux activity over the holidays.
• Windows down 88.68% to 88.26% (though Windows 7 betas are picking up)

After converting my MacBook Pro in to a Windows developer dream, I wanted to have the same experience on a more portable, commodity hardware unit. Virtualizing Windows within Windows with VMware Server is something I’m familiar with. It’s something many Windows developers may prefer (and I recommend if you’re not comfy with linux as your host OS).

Quick background: Virtualizing a development/qa environment allows one to have an easily cleaned control environment. When a machine gets dirty (too many installs, tests, builds, or other garbage collects), you can simply delete the virtual instance and copy a fresh installation back over. This saves a ton of time. In dev, this allows a safe, clean, environment to test builds in. In a QA environment, this allows a very fast way to return to a known state.

My goal in a virtualized dev/qa environment is to run a host which consumes an absolute minimum amount of resources. I run virtualization software that allows more than one running VM at a time, such as VMware Workstation (PC), VMware Fusion (Mac), or VMware Server (PC or Linux). If you’re running Windows as your host OS, I recommend Windows 2000 Advanced Server because it is tunable to consume less resources than any other flavor of Windows (including Windows 2000 Professional).

Given that Linux runs on wrist-watch sized systems, it’s a safe assumption that one will get better performance from virtual machines than on a virtualized Windows environment. I chose Ubuntu since it’s super simple to install, is fairly reliable, offers similar features to Windows, and is still a smaller footprint my Win2kAS machines.

I started with version 8.04 desktop (hardy). The installation was a piece of cake, but there are no tuning options in the basic .iso. I installed VMware Server, but just while running the OS I could tell I would run in to performance issues later. The desktop flavor of Ubuntu isn’t light enough to pass all the processing power through to the VMs.

Instructions

1. Install Ubuntu Server 8.04 – For those of you doing this for the first time and are coming from a Windows environment, you should use the following disk setup (assuming you have a single hard drive):

• 20 GB EXT3 partition, set as boot (“/”).
• 2 GB SWAP.
• remaining space, set up for home (“/home”).

2. Install Xubuntu with apt-get – Ubuntu Server doesn’t have a UI. Ubuntu Desktop is too heavy. Xfce is an outstanding light GUI desktop alternative. To get this installed:

1. Boot up your now Ubuntu Server machine.
2. You will land at the command prompt, type “sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop” (without the quotes).
3. Enter your password to grant privledges to download/install the Xfce GUI. It will take a while to download as the Xubuntu install is about 300 MB.
4. Reboot when ready, you’ll boot in to Xubuntu.
5. At the login prompt, choose to change the type of GUI you’re logging in to. Select Xfce.

3. Install VMware Server (as of this writing, server 2.0 is in beta and not recommended for a performance environment – stick to 1.0.x) – This was a total pain in the butt my first time around. I hope my instructions here allow you a fairly pain-free installation. Additional resources here, here, and here.

1. Open Firefox, available as a shortcut at the top of the screen.
2. Download VMware Server here: http://vmware.com/products/server/
3. It is now on your desktop, go to the Applications button at the top left and choose Accessories -> Terminal to open a terminal.
4. Type “cd Desktop” to move to your desktop.
5. Unpack the archive. Type “tar -xvf vmware[TAB]” (hit the tab key to complete the filename).
6. Move in to your VMware folder. Type “cd vmware[TAB]“.
7. Visit the ‘here, here, and here’ links above for all the resources you’ll need to get past the now-known errors you’ll run in to.

4. Copy VM instances from other systems – I use VMware Fusion on my Mac and VMware Workstation on a PC (haven’t used Workstation in a while). You can create instances in either of these products and then just copy them over to your Ubuntu system. Tips:

• Keep the fresh install VM instances as they are and make copies. You can now just drop in a copy of the fresh install so you don’t have to ever re-install the OS again.
• Install your dev and/or qa environment. Make a snapshot NOW. You can now revert to this snapshot immediately, whenever you want. Fresh, known, starting point: viola!

5. Tweak your VMware instance settings:

• Leave your host OS enough RAM to be comfortable. Give each VM as much as it needs.
• Disable 3D acceleration unless you absolutely need it in the VM for testing 3D. This is a resource hog.
• If your PC is multi-core, only give the VM 1 CPU (unless you need to test multi-core software).

6. Dev and QA to your heart’s content – You’re now free to revert, take snapshots, and otherwise manipulate your OS without the fear and wasted time of reinstallation. Enjoy!

:

When following a lot of friends in a flow environment and using XMPP, one sees the above numbers in less than ten minutes. I’d been using Adium, but Adium doesn’t smooth scroll between each received tweet. It constantly jerks messages upwards and has made it virtually impossible to have a meaningful experience. There are often times when I want to read each incoming tweet. A good, smooth, reading experience was needed.

iChat has a slightly smoother hit at each received message, and is therefore much more enjoyable to read. The interface is customizable enough, but nothing quite as nice as some of Adium’s minimal themes.

I was mostly hesitant to switch since Adium has outstanding AppleScript support. I’ve been thinking of prototyping something (given a couple hours – someday). Apparently iChat has something even better which I should have known about… Callbacks! A script can fire for each received message.

This will make dynamic, real-time, filtering a reality.

The start of something very cool…

After reading this great, hilarious, post on upgrading to XP (yes, you read that right – this isn’t a Vista upgrade), I decided to take the plunge. I’ve been punished long enough for using Vista Ultimate in my VMware environment and portable laptop. It’s been a nice OS, but performance is in the toilet and I can’t take it any more.

It’ll hang around for testing purposes… Here’s hoping SP1 brings some hope to Vista.

Developing PC applications on the Mac is great, contrary to what some believe. I too was once in the ‘build-on-the-platform-you-target’ camp. Forget that horse-puckie and get efficient:

1. Get VMware Fusion: http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/.
2. Make sure you’ve got XCode. This will be sixty percent of your development environment and you’ll be coding in OS X.
3. Install Windows XP or Vista, your choice, as a new VM in Fusion. This will be the other forty percent of your development environment where you’ll step code and delve out builds. Don’t set it up with more than 40% of your Mac’s RAM assigned (preferably 25%).
4. Install your development tools on this Windows instance, probably .NET 2005.
5. Set up a shared folder for your source code between your Mac user folder and the dev VM. Make it read-write by both systems (a setting in Fusion).
6. Set up more VMs in Fusion. These are your Test VMs (smaller, fast Windows instances used as QA machines) – as of this writing you should make XP Home, XP Pro, Vista Home, and Vista Ultimate VMs. You may want additional setups depending on your apps needs (administrator settings, etc). Set these up with 25% or less of your available RAM.
7. Do nothing… I’m waiting for you to finish step 6… It takes a while.
8. Run Windows Update (if desired) and take Snapshots of each VM (Command+T) after they’re set up. These Snapshots will let you revert to a clean state any time you wish.

Great, now you’re hooked up and can get your code on. With XCode you can utilize all your monitors (if you’re a developer using less than 2 monitors, we need to talk…). You’ll have XCode running with your source code all over the place organized how you like it. You’ll have your development VM running in a corner.

Use XCode as the code editor (you’ve got your source files saved on the Mac, in the shared folder). Keep the development VM running and hit Control+B in it (or better yet, add an AppleScript to XCode to pass Control+B to the VM) when you need a new build. You can step through the code when you need to.

When you’re ready to test your app(s) on all flavors of Windows, launch up the various VMs and install the app(s). Afterwards, restore to the Snapshot you took before. You’re starting from a nice clean start every time.

What’s better than getting a dual-boot solution with 64-bit Vista and OS X on a Core 2 Duo laptop? How about triple-booting OS X, 64-bit Vista, and your favorite flavor of linux? (along with a shared ext3 drive so you can avoid using FAT32 or Boot Camp)

Before getting too much further and so you don’t waste your time, I’ll tell you a little secret: you can’t have all of the above quite yet, but you can get darned close. And I’d bet you’ll get this functionality within a few weeks – maybe by the time you’ve read this – stay tuned… Here’s where I’m at so far.

I’ve gone through the full installation of 64-bit Vista on a MacBook Pro Core2Duo… Followed by the installation of 32-bit Vista, and then reinstalling 64-bit again to make sure I wasn’t crazy.

64-bit:
1. Skip Boot Camp. You don’t need the drivers and it limits you to two partitions.
2. To get the triple-boot functionality, install rEFIt on OS X (http://refit.sourceforge.net/).
3. Use diskutil resizeVolume to resize the OS X partition and create the Linux and Windows partitions (go to the triple-boot tutorial link at the bottom of this post)
3. Insert and install Vista 64-bit disc.
4. Be impressed, it’s a smooth installation – Microsoft gives you most of the drivers you need, including the display, but not wifi (which is a deal breaker for me). Nobody seems to have a 64-bit signed driver for the Atheros AR5008 chipset.
* The ext2/3 drivers obviously won’t work on this 64-bit setup either.
** It’s sexy and fast. Maybe I’m overeager for 64-bit’s, but it really does feel smoother and faster than the 32-bit counterpart. Presumably Apple will have 64-bit drivers relatively soon (especially since their 32 bit versions don’t work with Vista either!?)

32-bit – better, but still not as good as 32-bit XP:
Simply follow the steps above, but with a 32-bit version of Vista. I followed the instructions here: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45113

The 32-bit verson leaves you without right-click trackpad support (as far as I’ve found thus far), but the wifi driver works great.

There ya go… triple-booting Vista 64-bit with multiple partitions.

The best resources I’ve found to date:
rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/ – great multi-boot tool for Macs, much better than the built in version and allows bypassing of bootcamp.
A couple other experiences with 64-bit and 32-bit Vista installations: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45113
Triple-boot tutorial and walk-through: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
Ext2/3 support for Windows: http://www.fs-driver.org/

The above should get you nicely on your way. My conclusion is that it’ll be best to wait another week or two until Apple has Vista compatable drivers available. With the above instructions you can have a triple-booting system with a shared Ext2 partion.

Again, in the end, you have the following options:
1. OS X, Linux, Vista 64-bit – no wifi, no Ext2/3 support for Vista (yet).
2. OS X, Linux, Vista x86 – wifi, no Ext2/3 for Vista (yet).
3. OS X, Linux, XP – wifi and Ext2/3 are great, but no Vista.