MacWorld |
January, 01, 2003 1:32 PM |
OSXGuru |
Just wanted to let you folks know that I'm going to be at MacWorld next week. Other World Computing is going to have a great booth, with hourly demos by various shareware and freeware authors (including me!). Here's a link to the demo schedule: http://eshop.macsales.com/macworld/ I'm planning to demo XPostFacto 3.0. It isn't finished, unfortunately, but I have got the "booting from a Firewire device" feature working (as of 10 minutes ago :-). I'm also planning to demo OWC Cache Config, which is the successor to L2CacheConfig. It will detect cache settings automatically (instead of requiring the GrabL2CacheSetting step), and it will support the L3 cache as well as the L2 (hence the name change). I hope to see some of you there. |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 20, 2003 7:01 PM |
OSXGuru |
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The demos went pretty well, but I won't be posting the alpha right away--there are a couple of issues to fix first (see my earlier post). |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 09, 2003 9:16 PM |
powderhaus |
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How did the demos go? Could you give us a alpha? |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 09, 2003 10:53 AM |
OSXGuru |
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mjoecups358: That's about right. The FW drive will need Mac OS X installed, though not necessarily by XPostFacto--you could clone it from another machine, for instance. (XPostFacto will notice if its extensions aren't there, and install them). Then what XPostFacto 3 will do is set things up in a way that is a little analogous to the way it sets up an install from a CD (the details are a little different, but the principle is the same). Basically, XPostFacto copies the kernel and the kernel extensions from the FW drive to a "helper" drive (which would be a SCSI or ATA drive of your choice). You don't have to have Mac OS X installed on that "helper" drive--XPostFacto will take care of what is needed. Then XPostFacto will set up the boot parameters so that the initial part of the boot process (loading the kernel and the kernel extensions) happens on the "helper" drive, but the FW drive is used as the "root" drive. The net effect is that you have booted from the FW drive. I've been demoing this at MacWorld (and will do it again today and tomorrow). It works, but there are a couple of issues left to deal with before I let it out of the box. 1. I need a way to synchronize the kernel and kernel extensions between the FW drive and the helper drive. As far as Mac OS X is concerned, once you have finished booting, the FW drive is the root drive, and Mac OS X doesn't know anything about the "helper" drive. So if you install an update from 10.2.2 to 10.2.3, for instance, Mac OS X does not know by itself that those changes need to be made on the "helper" drive as well. So I'll need to write a little background application that keeps the two synchronized. I don't think that will be particularly difficult. There are a couple of options as to how it could be done--I'll have to experiment and see which seems most feasible. 2. For some reason, when I boot from Firewire drives, the ATA drives don't mount. I'll have to track down why this is happening--hopefully it is some simple issue related to driver synchronization between the helper drive and the FW drive, but we'll see. 3. Booting from FW drives so far only works with some FW PCI cards and not with others. The symptom (when it doesn't work) is that the FW driver reports numerous errors accessing the drive. Some operations complete successfully, and others don't. Depending on which operations complete successfully, I've been getting part way through the boot process before things fail. However, on the FW PCI cards that work, the process is quite reliable--it just works. So I'm thinking that the distinction between the cards that work and the cards that don't work must relate either to the cards using different chipsets for FW support, or possibly to issues related to support for versions of the PCI bus. One further question is why the the FW PCI cards that don't work for booting are OK for mounting drives if you boot from elsewhere. One possibility is that it relates to virtual memory--since VM would use the FW drive when you boot from it, and not otherwise. Or it could just be that errors are less "recoverable" when you are trying to boot than otherwise. I can think of a couple of ways of testing this. In particular, if VM is the issue, it shouldn't be too hard to put VM on the "helper" drive instead of the FW drive. So I'll experiment some more when I get home. |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 09, 2003 7:32 AM |
powderhaus |
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Does anyone know if it was a succses??? |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 09, 2003 1:20 AM |
mjoecups358 |
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So I presume the bootable FW drive would need Xpostfacto installed on it (obviously...) which would somehow? get a handoff of the boot from the Old World mac... I presume you would also need a bootable Xpostfacto partition on the mac too.... Marty |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 08, 2003 5:13 PM |
marcush |
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Britney, I took some pictures with my digital camera yesterday. There are pictures from the South hall show floor, close-ups of the new Powerbooks, and a picture of Ryan at the OWC booth. If you want them let me know where to ftp them. |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 06, 2003 3:31 PM |
marcush |
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O.K. Brintey, I'll bring my camera with me tomorrow and over the next few days. I'll be taking extended lunches this week. |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 05, 2003 1:05 PM |
brfransen |
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Marcus, I do have a .Mac account so if we could figure some way for me to get them (maybe via FTP) I could put them up there. Britney |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 03, 2003 11:38 PM |
marcush |
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Britney, I have a camera but nowhere to upload the movies.I didn't pay for .Mac. |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 03, 2003 1:22 PM |
pbell3 |
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I am excited by a major revision of XPF. Because of the quirky nature of using OSX on my Box-stock 8600/300, I have given up on using OSX on it (went back to OS9.1 on it, and is stable as a rock). The fix is a Carbon version of XPF which manipulates the PRAM properly for Startup-Disk functions. I am hoping this is the primary thrust of development of XPF r3.x, although there is lots of other things that need extensions for . |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 02, 2003 7:51 PM |
powderhaus |
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I will be a tester from the start. I like doing this stuff :) |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 02, 2003 7:46 PM |
powderhaus |
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when it gets working it will be sweet! |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 02, 2003 5:45 PM |
OSXGuru |
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Yeah, I must admit that I'm a little afraid of kernel panics during the demos :-) I *may* release 3.0.0a1 during or after MacWorld--we'll see how it goes. The problem is that it really is alpha-quality at this point--I would like to have some comfort level that it won't misbehave too badly before releasing it. |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 02, 2003 1:14 PM |
powderhaus |
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Firewire booting will be sweet!!!! Can't wait. to bad i can't attend. I live on the east coast :( I hope you don't pull a bill gates!(when he was demoing windows 95 or 98 and his "plug and play" that gave him the blue screen of death haha :) Will 3.0 be out for us to use after macworld or is there still alot of work to be done? |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 02, 2003 9:28 AM |
brfransen |
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Is there any way those of us unable to attend MacWorld can get in on some of the info shared? Marcus, do you have a video camera? ;-) Britney |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 02, 2003 3:45 AM |
tempest |
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Tempting. Looks like OWC has quite a schedule planned. |
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RE: MacWorld |
January, 01, 2003 5:55 PM |
marcush |
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I'll be there. It's just a short bus ride downtown. I'm anxious to see your demos. |