Snow Leopard UTD finally arrived

After 6 days since the release of Snow Leopard, my UTD discs finally came in the mail yesterday. I was somewhat upset during launch day when my order status said backordered. It’s puzzling that the company who made the software and distributes it, is backordered. I could’ve gone to the store and bought a full version. I heard they had a ton there.

My co-worker got his full version copy 10am that day. I couldn’t wait so I borrowed it from him after he upgraded his MBP and upgraded my MBP. So far I’ve gotten a few app crashes but it seems after the first crash, they tend to run normal again. I hear 10.6.1 is around the corner so it should fix some stuff.

Anyways, here are some pics I took.

As you can see from the 3rd pic, the UTD (Up to date) discs are upgrade only. The retail $30 ones should be full versions. Another thing I noticed is there is a Optional Install folder now on the disc. It has OS X applications such as Mail, iCal, Address Book, etc. Also has Rosetta. This is great coz in the past, if any of the apps needs to be reinstalled, you can either copy it from another working OS X and fix the permissions or reinstall OS X. Now just pop in the Snow Leopard disc and you can install it anytime.

Here’s a before and after pic of my hard drive on my Mac Mini MB138LL/A. Notice the changes to the hard drive size.

Here’s an article that explains about the capacity change – http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=589.

Updating PHP 5 with Godaddy and a Dedicated server

Jeff called me up asking for help with his dedicated server on Godaddy. He needed to update his PHP 5.1.6 to the latest stable version. His server is running Centos 5.2 (Final). He tried to call Godaddy for assistance and of course they were no help. I’m no expert myself but have played around with different systems. I found out that you can use the yum command to manage the installed packages. The problem is that the current repositories yum looks at does not contain new versions of PHP. This is why you get an error that says something like – cannot find PHP. What you need to do is add a repository that does have a newer version of PHP. We’re going to add Jason Litka’s repository.

• Log in to the Simple Control Panel
• Log in using SSH
• Type “su – ” to log in with root privileges
• Type “nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo”. If you’re not comfortable with nano, use whatever editor you’re more comfortable with.
• In the utterramblings.repo file type the following
  

  [utterramblings]
  name=Jason’s Utter Ramblings Repo
  baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/
  enabled=1
  gpgcheck=1
  gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

• Save the file and close it
• Now you can use “yum update php” and it should update it to the latest that the repositories have
• Restart Apache

This tutorial is based on the one found at http://www.jasonlitka.com/yum-repository/. It took awhile for me to find the solution. I hope this helps out people who had the same problem as I did.

Upgrading my iMac MB324LL/A

My 320GB hard drive is starting to fill up on my iMac so I decided to get a 1TB hard drive. I knew opening the iMac is going to be a pain. I’ve seen videos from YouTube on how to open the previous plastic models and it looked hard. Nevertheless, I needed to upgrade my hard drive and I want someone else to do it. Besides, I wanted to know how to do it and do it myself. So the first thing I needed to do is look for videos on YouTube. I kept getting the plastic iMac model but kept searching. I found 2 pretty good videos: by lexusnut and by Zenn3k. Those were my starting point.

It took my cousin and I two hours to finally access the motherboard area. I cannot stress enough on how careful you must be. Apple has placed wires in many areas where if you lift something quickly, you may pull it out of place or unplug it – leading to damaging your device. We documented the process and uploaded it on YouTube to help others.

So now I got the new 1TB hard drive installed. How do I get my old system on the new drive? There are 2 ways to do this. The first way is to use Time Machine (if you actually did use it). You can install a fresh copy of Leopard on the new hard drive. After installation, you get an option to use a Time Machine back up to restore. I’ve tried this but since I have over 200GB of data, my iMac ends up sleeping while trying to load the data to restore.

The second option is the image the old hard drive and restore it on the new one. This option took me about a day to complete. What you will need is an external hard drive, your old hard, and the new hard drive. If you image your old drive before installing the new one, you don’t need a second external enclosure. The first thing you’ll do is to boot your computer using the Leopard DVD. Open Disc Utility on the Leopard DVD. Do not do this while booted on the hard drive. It’s possible that it will not work because the drive you are imaging is in use. The external hard drive is where you will save the image file. Once finished, restore the image onto the new hard drive. That’s pretty much a brief summary of what I did.

I did run into some errors while formatting the new hard drive. This post helped me out http://macosx.com/forums/hardware-peripherals/290989-disk-utility-problem-erasing-large-external-hard-drive.html.

The image/restore process took most of the day. It may be quicker or longer for you, depending on the size of the data. Make sure you take any necessary precautions before working on your expensive Apple hardware

Asus EEEPC 900A Memory Installation

I just got my new 2GB DDR ram for my Asus EEEPC 900A. It was easy to install. Just remove 2 screws underneath the netbook to gain access to both ram and SSD drive. Below is the Youtube video I uploaded.

OS X Leopard: First thoughts and upgrade troubles

I just want to let you know the experience I had with upgrade to Leopard from Tiger. The upgrade went smooth on my PowerMac G5. It took about 48 minutes. All my apps seem to still be compatible.

Then I started to upgrade my MacBook Pro. Things looked normal. The trouble started after my laptop restarted once the upgrade process completed. It was stuck in the all too familiar blue screen of death (Apple version). I felt like I was back in Windows again. Apparently, it’s giving many people problems as well – http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1195031&tstart=0.

I left it on that screen over night and woke up this morning still in the same screen. There are 2 possible solutions that I’ve read so far in that long list of discussion.

Option 1: Archive and Install. This is the route I took and so far it seems to work. There are reported issues with Mail crashing when doing this method though. I don’t use Mail much so it is not a concern. This will require more hard drive space, I believe an extra 4GB is needed.

Option 2: Restart in Single User mode and enter some commands. I would’ve tried this by the time I read the post, I was already doing the Archive and Install. There is a chance that your administrator rights will be removed.

So far:

- Time Machine lives up to the hype. You are still able to use the selected external hard drive as a regular storage drive along with using it with Time Machine.
- Browsing other computers on the network have never been easier.
- Spotlight will be indexing your files after the install/upgrade. Depending on how much data you have, will determine how long it takes. On my G5 it took about 30. It will not prevent you from doing other things. It runs quietly in the background.
- Quick Look is great and fast. Viewing files from Windows displays the “blue screen of death” as the icon.

Hope this helps you guys. Even though I had problems upgrading my laptop, I still feel it’s worth the upgrade. Just make sure to back up.

And finally, I am glad I got to experience an Apple release event. There were about 200 people in line as they started to sell Leopard. It’s interesting that even though there are not many Apple users as Windows users; whenever Apple has something new to offer, majority of its users respond.

UPDATE: My MBP was affected by the admin bug. I was worried for a moment and I didn’t feel like doing a clean install tonight. Here’s what I did:

1. Shutdown
2. Turn on the computer and hold down Apple + S to get in to single user mode
3. Type: /sbin/mount -uw /
4. Type: passwd
5. Enter your new password for root
6. Confirm it by retyping it again
7. Type: reboot
8. Once your back in, go to System Preference and edit your user accounts. When it asks for the admin’s username and password, enter root and the new password
9. Logoff and log back in and your set

Hope that helps some of you.