Snow Leopard 64bit kernel mode and VMWare Fusion.

Looking around on the internet I discovered that by default Snow Leopard boots into 32bit kernel mode (I wondered why I wasn’t getting any incompatibility issues) and to force OSX to boot into 64 bit kernel mode you need to hold down the 6 & 4 keys on startup.

I tried this out and it worked I confirmed this by going to System Profiler and checking whether 64 bit kernel mode extensions were loaded.

I thought cool maybe 8GB RAM will work now I have booted into 64bit mode but I wanted to try out all my critical applications first because theres no point having 8GB RAM if I can’t run any of my programs.  One of my most critical applications is VMWare Fusion which threw the following error message when I tried to open it.

Looks like VMWare doen’t support 64bit OS X yet so I won’t bother trying out the extra 4GB module yet as there is no point if I can’t run VMWare.

Installed Snow Leopard and still 8GB not supported

As an update to my blog post yesterday I have installed OSX Snow Leopard today and retried my MacBook with 8GB RAM and still no joy.  Think this is ridiculous from Apple and they should release a statement to say whether 8GB of RAM will ever be supported on these machines or not.

Looks like I’m sticking with 6GB for the time being anyway.

8GB unstable using OSX Leopard on my MacBook Pro

I bought a MacBook Pro in December 2008 and at the time Apple was saying that 4GB of RAM is the limit on these machines. Then mid 2009 Apple released a revision of the MacBook Pro that supports up to 8GB RAM. Since the architecture of the systems are the same I thought I would purchase a 4GB module and upgrade to 6GB RAM.

This worked perfectly, I got a well needed performance boost on my machine and as I run Windows constantly in VMWare Fusion this helped out a lot.

So being brave I ordered another 4GB module hoping that 8GB should work fine, I installed the module and booted up, so far so good. I looked at system profiler and 8GB of RAM showed up and both module had an OK status. After about 60 secs the machine froze, I rebooted and tried again, same thing. I took the RAM out and made sure it was seated properly and tried again, same thing.

So my conclusion is that OSX Leopard doesn’t support 8GB of RAM on my late 2008 MacBook Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting Snow Leopard and hoping that this addresses the issue if not then I’ve just waste hoping that 8GB should work fine, I installed the modules and booted up, so far so good. I looked at system profiler and 8GB of RAM showed up and both module had an OK status. After about 60 secs the machine froze, I rebooted and tried again, same thing. I took the RAM out and made sure it was seated properly and tried again, same thing.

So my conclusion is that OSX Leopard doesn’t support 8GB of RAM on my late 2008 MacBook Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting Snow Leopard and hoping that this addresses the issue if not then I’ve just wasted 270 pounds. Nice

Trying to run the VS 2010 CTP Virtual PC image inside VMWare Fusion on Mac OSX

I wanted to try out the latest CTP of Visual Studio 2010 but the CTP comes in the form of a VPC 2007 image which meant I had to run it inside a virtual machine. Not a problem in most cases but I already run all my Windows applications inside VMWare Fusion and this got me wondering how Virtual PC 2007 would run inside VMWare Fusion if it would run at all.

The answer is sadly no, I got the error message below when trying to boot up the VM. Looks like I’ll have to natively boot Vista to try out the VS 2010 CTP, no big deal but would have been kind of fun to run a VM inside a VM. Oh well.

Mac OS X Leopard

So last Friday Apple released it’s latest and greatest operating system entitled ‘Leopard’ to the UK market. I am fortunate enough to have a brand new Apple store open literally ten minutes from my house and this meant I could jump off the train after work Friday and go purchase a copy.

I was in and out of the Apple store in minutes and made my way home to spend my Friday night installing Leopard and Vista (how sad). I opted for a complete reinstall of both OS X and Windows Vista, I always do a clean install of operating systems just because you hear so many horror stories about upgrading.

I shared my hard drive space equally this time between Windows and OS X this is because I knew I would be using Vista alot and last time I barely left enough space to install Visual Studio.

Anyway I backed up all my files to an external drive and went to remove my bootcamp beta partition only to find that the beta had expired and I couldn’t do anything with it. This was slightly worrying but I hoped after installing Leopard I could remove partitions created with the beta which was exactly what I did.

It took me no more than 30 mins to completely install Leopard and about an hour to install Vitsa, mainly because I only have an upgrade version which meant installing XP first.

This time when creating a bootcamp partition you don’t need to create a driver disc as all the Windows drivers now come on the Leopard disc. I installed all the drivers and was happy to see that my iSight now works in Windows and I can now finally use it with Windows Live Messenger.

I stayed up until 3.30am reinstalling all my software onto Vista (Visual Studio, SQL Server etc etc) and I’m now up and running perfectly.

As far the improvements in Leopard go Im really happy, the whole OS seems to have had a slight performance increase and I love the new dock. I havn’t had much time to delve into every improvement but I’m sure I’ll find some nice new features as I work with it more and more.

For anyone wondering whether they should upgrade or not I would say unless you really want to be running the latest version then there not much you need to be worrying about. I mean, to me there is not enough new stuff to make a compelling argument for upgrading, most people (like me) will be upgrading to just try out Leopard and have the latest OS so to be honest theres nothing to lose sleep over.

Learning Objective-C

Since buying a MacBook I have been telling myself I need to get involved with a bit of Cocoa and learning how to write programs for OS X this involved learning a new language – Objecttive-C.

I already have a good grasp on C/C++ and Obj-C is basically just an extention to the C language so I thought it wouldn’t be too hard. I must admit I have taken to it pretty well, and can see the advantages to less strongly typed languages.

I had to get my head around the new method calling syntax which is very similar to smalltalk and the notion that you should think of object orientation in a different way but it’s always good to open your mind up to different paradigms.

Obj-C takes a different view to OO in that instead of always ‘subclassing’ objects you should create new ones and ‘cosume’ existing ones. This is common with less strongly typed languages as far as I can gather and it’s more about what objects know about other objects rather than an inheritance chain that is more common to strongly typed languages.

I bought Cocoa Programming for OS X from amazon because the Apple documentation is more for reference than learning. I’m nearly half way through it in a couple of days so I would definately recommend this book very highly if your looking to learn Cocoa.

Anyway hopefully I’ll be able to post up my first real Cocoa program soon.