Windows 7: a la prueba

He estado probando un poco la última versión de Windows: Windows 7, que se supone llegará al mercado mundial a finales de este año, claro, eso si todo va bien y como se espera, pero en los últimos 10 años nunca ha sido el caso, así que creo que podremos contar con esta nueva versión a mediados del 2010 o mediados del 2011, sin embargo ya circula por la red (descargable de la página de Microsoft) una versión Beta de esta nueva entrega.

No soy para nada fanático de los productos de Microsoft y al ser un asiduo usuario de Mac siempre me gusta probar las nuevas versiones de Windows para ver en que se parecen (o que han copiado) -y cada vez más- del sistema operativo de Mac o alguna de las -ya tan gráficamente potentes- versiones de Linux.

Lo primero es que la instalación ha mejorado mucho, es considerablemente más rápida, aunque esto no es un veredicto final ya que sigue en Beta. La parte gráfica básicamente es la misma solo con pequeñas mejoras y detalles que seguro le gustaran a más de uno; a mi en lo personal no me han impresionado.

Aparte de todas las “cosas buenas” que propone, ya empiezan a saltar los errores y es que esta versión Beta tiene uno interesante: de un modo muy extraño es capaz de destruir todos los archivos MP3 que se encuentra por delante.

Al parecer el Windows 7 escribe meta-datos en los primeros segundos de los archivos MP3 y de este modo los deja totalmente sin uso. Lo que si está claro es que el problema no solo viene del nuevo Windows Media Player 12, que se incluye con esta versión de Windows, así que el problema también aparece cuando se reproducen los archivos con cualquier otro programa, incluso si Windows Media Player ha sido desinstalado por completo del equipo, entonces, el problema parece venir de una librería dinámica que se comunica con los altavoces, pero no se sabe aun cual puede ser.

Ahora solo nos queda esperar a ver si encuentran pronto el problema, menos mal que aun esta en Beta.

MySQL for Leopard

I don’t know since how long, but I just found out that there’s already a stable version of MySQL to run on OS X “Leopard”. You may find a download link at this URL.

I haven’t installed this new version yet, but as I red it fixes all the issues from the previous versions, particularly the one about having the MySQL extension in the preferences pane of the system. This new version is also supposed to run better and faster on Intel based Macs. Well, let’s see, I’ll update this post as soon as I have done some serious testing with it.

It’s evolution, baby!

osxboxes.png

Running MAMP

As I posted previously I’m now running MAMP as I wait for a nice PHP 5 package to be available. I did some research about how MAMP handles the htdocs folder, which is the one where you should have you web pages stored, and here are my findings. MAMP is designed to be self-contained, meaning it will not work if the htdocs folder is outside the MAMP folder in your applications, however, I just, accidentally, found a way of doing this and actually keep MAMP working.

If you open the httpd.conf file in /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache and scroll all the way down, you will find the virtual hosts section, in this section add a new virtual host, like this:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName localhost
DocumentRoot “/Users/Stefan/Sites”
</VirtualHost>

In the previous example /Users/Stefan/Sites is where I have my pages stored and each time I call http://localhost in my browser MAMP will actually load the pages from there, so I have no need of moving everything into the MAMP’s htdocs folder.

You can add as much virtual hosts as you like and place them wherever you like, and MAMP will load and parse them just fine. You’re actually tricking it into believing the files are stored where they “should”.

Leopard and PHP 5

Another one, it’s pretty nice to have PHP 5 bundled with Leopard, but it’s a very basic version of PHP, I guess the only library compiled into it is MySql, theres not even GD, so you will need to compile PHP on your own including all the libraries you need to get it to run. Honestly I’m to lazy for that right now so I just got MAMP up and running for now, until Marc has a compatible version to distribute.

I’ll keep you posted.

Leopard: starting the issues

Amazing! I just completed the entire install, configuration, set-up and finally everything seems to be working on my Mac as it should, but nothing in life is perfect and here we go.

Take important notice of this!!!

When I installed Leopard I chose the default file system (HSFX) which means the HDD will be case sensitive, meaning you can have test.jpg and test.JPG in the same folder and the OS will handle them as different files, which is just what I need for my developing work. However Adobe does not support this format.

I went on to install the CS3 package and got an interesting notice:

nosupport.png

After doing some research I found out that Adobe just does not support this file system in their installations since it’s apparently inconceivable that anyone would ever need case-sensitivity as the default file system, so they choose not to support it… I would say they could easily publish that case-sensitive file systems are not supported in the package system requirements or perhaps include anything in the FAQ or general support sections.

Getting CS3 to work would take a reformat and reinstall of my system drive since they use some of the built in frameworks and the system needs to know where to find them.

Never mind that thousands of third-party developers seem to be able to write applications that both leverage system frameworks and work without a hitch on my “unsupported” file system.

Be wise, take a look at this before upgrading to Leopard:

- Applications not compatible with Leopard
- (www.unsanity.com) Compatibility

Moving to Leopard

I have spent my last hours on installing the all-new Leopard on my Mac, it actually went pretty fast. I haven’t had much time to check out the entire thing as I’ve been busy setting up my development environment (Apache, PHP, MySQL).

The good thing is that Leopard ships with Apache 2 and PHP 5.2 pre installed, so you only need to make a couple of changes to get Apache and PHP running in no time, I’ll explain how to do that. The bad news is that the current MySQL package file does not fully work on Leopard, well, the engine actually works, it’s the preference pane that does not work yet, so you won’t be able to use that to stop and start you MySQL DB, I’ll post a nice trick to get that running as well.

Firefox 2.0 on Mac keeps freezing

Well, I don’t know if it’s only me but FF keeps freezing on my MacBook Pro all the time, as soon as I have more than 3 tabs open it just freezes and does not respond at all, only force-quitting it solves the problem. The issue usually comes up when I load a page with embedded video and it’s really weird.

It’s certainly not a requirements issue as my Mac runs an Intel Core Duo at 2.2 Ghz and 2 GB or RAM, and that should easily be able to handle a couple of tabs open at the same time. I’ve worked with Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, iTunes and a couple documents at the same time and no problems at all, except that it get so hot you could easy fry an egg on it.

Another thing I hate about FF is the amount of resources it takes, on a regular run with about 4 tabs open loaded with mostly plain text it already uses a few hundred MB of RAM, this just ain’t normal and some Windows FF users may have noticed the same issue. It’s killing the resources. By the way, I already tried reinstalling it a couple of times. No luck!

I can’t wait on version 3 of FF, I hear they have several major fixed and even more improvements, well, I guess we’ll see when it’s around.

Here’s some extra reading:

- Frequent freezes on Mac
- Is FF on Mac unusable?
- Mozilla Gran Paradiso Alpha 3
- FireFox 3 schedule