I have been trying for a long time to find a way to image Macs from our WDS server to no avail…Macs don’t have PXE boot!  WDS has had a feature to allow you to create a “Discover” image and a resulting disc to boot from.  However, typically when just using the GUI to create this disc, it boots up with a command prompt window, runs winpeinit and then that’s it.  After some deep searching, I found a blog with accurate instructions for how to actually create a disc that will not only boot up to winPE but also launch straight into the WDS deploy on a given server.  It does require command line but the latest WAIK has some very verbose and useful tools, making it not too hard even for a WDS novice.

Thanks to David Bolton’s blog: http://www.davidbolton.com/?p=24

I also had to extract the network drivers from the Snow Leopard bootcamp disc but for general purposes, adding all of the drivers from the latest LAN Driver Pack to the disc image will make sure to cover a wide variety of machines.  Check out my previous post for the easiest way to add these via command line!

I have been doing a lot of work lately on deployments of Windows 7 (Yes, companies are jumping on board already since they sat on their hands during the Vista years).  Some of the new features of Windows Deployment Services in Server 2008 R2 are really nice, especially the driver package management.  However, it is somewhat limited in flexibility as the drivers can only be applied to deployed images based on a few very inflexible filters.  If there are some drivers that you want to apply directly to an image, you have to resort to the command line.  In my case, I was actually creating a WDS boot CD (which is not as easy as Microsoft’s directions) using the directions here: http://www.davidbolton.com/?p=24 .

The problem comes in with the Windows 7 Automate Installation Kit because some of the commands I was familiar with have been done away with.  This is not to say is is less feature packed, instead the peimg command has been rolled in with a few others under dism.  Here is how you can use dism even more powerfully than peimg.

As you can see, DISM has a number of options when it comes to making changes to images either in offline file-structure format or mounted (online) .wim files.  The option we want to focus on here is the /Add-driver switch.  The nice thing about DISM is that at any point in making a command, you can put a /? switch after what you have and it will tell you what further options you have at this point and even gives some examples.

You will notice that doing a /add-driver /driver:c:\whatever /recurse will search a given directory for drivers and add all of them, recursing through any sub directories.  This is useful for a situation where you have a driver installer that you unzipped instead of installing and you want to add all of the different drivers for different architectures or OS versions to an image.  The resulting DISM command then looks like this:

dism /image:f:\winpe /add-driver /driver:f:\drivers\LAN /recurse

That’s all there is to it!  Then you just follow how to commit the changes to the image you were working on.

The Aspire One is not a multimedia powerhouse, but my primary use for it is to take it to school and work with me as an alternative to lugging my Macbook Pro around.  However, it isn’t my primary machine, which brings up the issue of how do I keep my data together without having to swap files around on a flash drive or something?  Most of these apps I use the most address this issue.

Calaboration

Calaboration is a tool to synchronize your Google Calendar with iCal.  I have struggled for quite some time to find an easy and efficient way to migrate my iCal to Google Calendar without much success.  However, Google recently released this tool and it led me to move my calendar off of my computer and into the cloud.  Now, I can easily sync any of my Macs with Google Calendar as well as my phone.

Crossover Mac

This is an evolution of Crossover Office, a commercial WINE application.  This allows you to natively run Windows applications without rebooting to Windows or running a virtual machine.  This is important as the Atom processor in the Aspire One does not support the Intel VT technology, which makes virtual machines speedy enough to be close to native speed.  Aka, it would be dog slow to run a VM on an Atom processor.  So, this allows you to individually install supported applications such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Quickbooks, and other non-supported applications many times may work.  I got a free copy when they gave them away in the fall, but the package normally costs $40.

Dropbox

Oh, how I love Dropbox.  Dropbox is an application that allows you to sync files and folders between computers with ease.  Basically, it creates a dropbox folder on your system, and you can create folders within and files all as if it’s on your computer, which it is.  However, Dropbox also syncs it with their servers and even creates revisions, not only keeping your changes up to date, but old revisions should you need to go back to them.  Sync with another computer, and the files are once again stored as local data, only to be synced when updated.  Even better, you can share folders and files with other people which has become critically important for collaborating in one of my classes.  Oh, and did I mention it works on Linux and Windows too?

Evernote

Evernote is your new best friend if you are working on projects.  It is one of the best GTD (getting things done) applications because of its flexibility.  It is an application that can capture images, web pages, documents, and just plain text notes into a notebook and make it all searchable.  You can organize notes into diferent tags and categories for different projects.  Best of all, it syncs with the Evernote server so, like Dropbox, all of your notes are available and searchable if you log into the Evernote website!  And of course, you can sync it with multiple computers; not just Macs, PCs, iPhones, Windows Mobiles, and more are invited to the note syncing party.

Automator

Wait a sec, that last thing is called Mount Music?  Well, it’s basically an Automator workflow I put together to, with the click of a button, log into my windows server, mount the music share, and allow me to fire up iTunes right away.  Automator looks scary at first, but it uses a pretty basic language structure to allow you to create a workflow with no programming experience required.  If you want to demonstrate an activity you want to automate, you can even just click the record button from the workflow menu and your Mac will watch you do something and be able to replicate that task with the push of a button.  It may not seem too useful but once you begin to play around with what you can automate, it can definitely make mundane tasks much easier.

The goal of getting this Acer Aspire One was to create, in essence, a Macbook Mini that would be light, fit my daily needs at work and class, and have great battery power.  While I love my Macbook Pro, I can’t deny the battery issues…in one year of ownership, the battery capacity has dropped to 50%, giving me barely a 1:45 hour runtime with lowest power settings.  Also, lugging it around all the time with books can’t be good for my back.

Enough blabbing, onto the install!

Basically, I followed the instructions provided by the geniuses on aspireoneuser forums: click here

Here are my notes on that install.

I decided not to use an external dvd drive, and instead used my 4GB USB drive.  There are instructions here for preparing your flash drive and putting the install image on it. NOTE: The diskpart step I could only get to work in Vista as in 2003 and XP, it couldn’t see the drive’s partition when setting it active.

I would follow the instructions for the majority of the install, but I definitely recommend using the Voodoo kernel.  While it means you can’t use Software Update for OS updates, 10.5.6 isn’t a huge change over 10.5.5, so I wasn’t concerned.  Voodoo will be releasing updates soon to make this possible anyway, so I determined the performance jump of having hyperthreading and not having to set a boot flag was the way to go.  Also, note that sometimes the progress bar appeared stuck, don’t worry, it’s moving, for some odd reason it doesn’t always show!

As for the wireless card, there are some flakey ways to get it working, but instead, I got a cheap Dell 1390 PCI Express card off of eBay and put it in following this walkthrough.  While I was in there, I bumped the RAM to 1.5GB.  One thing I will note is that you don’t need to freak out too much about the keyboard, if you pop the pins in too far with a screwdriver, you just have to pop them back into the slots from the back of the case top.

From there, you have a well-working copy of OS X.  I’ll provide some more tweaks and steps to do them soon!

Sleep does not work and due to the nature of having to reverse engineer video drivers in the kernel, the current conensus on the aspireoneuser forums is that it is not a priority..

About This Mac and Airport working:

Hyperthreading isn’t dual-core but it does speed things up:

I recently have been thinking about the sudden surge of Netbooks we have seen and how nice it would be to have such a portable device with great battery life.  The recent realization that my Macbook Pro’s battery in one year has become barely able to get through a single hour and a half class made this clearer than ever that big, powerful laptops have their place but are not a catch-all.  So, after some eBay hunting, I found a sweet deal on an Acer Aspire One:

2.3 Lbs, 6-cell battery for a rated 6 hour battery life, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz Processor, 1GB RAM, 8.9″ Screen

Clearly, not a speed demon but powerful enough for most non-gaming or video needs…

It ships with Windows XP Home on it, which I promptly decided I was going to wipe and set up XP Pro to dual boot with OS X.  However, this Netbook, like most, does not include a CD drive…so it was off to the fun world of USB drives!

After some hunting, I found a great guide on the Aspire One User Forums, which are my primary resource for help with this device. http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8151

Basically, it involves making a flash drive bootable and then copying over the contents of the XP install disc so that you can boot off of it and preform the install.  Once I had that all set, I grabbed the drivers off of Acer’s website and got my XP install all set.  At this point, I needed to shrink my XP partition which I decided to do by downloading Hiren’s boot disc (google it) and using another set of tools to make my flash drive bootable again with the Hiren’s disc image.

A key to having a dual-boot OSx86 install is to make sure you partition it as well as formatting it because the MacOS installer can’t format free space on a volume.

Having done all of this, I started preparing with the actual tools for installing OS X.