After Mac OS X 10.5.5 – cannot reenable additional Screen Sharing (ARD) functions hack

[EDIT: Solution Found to enable screen sharing full screen, here ]

I’d reported that a hack existed to enable Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) alike functionality in the humble built in Screen Sharing client in this post.  Unfortuantely, this hack no longer works to enable the ARD like client functions in Leopard 10.5.5, which means:

• No more black and white or 256 colour (greyscale) quality for low bandwidth connections.
• No more clipboard copying.
• No more curtains for the remote screen.
• And: NO MORE FULL SCREEN VNC!

Oh! Unless, that is, you splash out $299 for a TEN LICENCE ADMINISTRATOR’S PACK!

Jeezus H Kriste and his twelve frollicking followers! Leopard must now have the world’s only VNC client that costs $299 to enable full screen.

Kind of reminds me of when Apple used to charge $29 to enable the amzingly awesome

• Quicktime “Pro” function:  playback video full screen…

Except that this costs more than 10 times the price!

As much as I still like Mac OS X, things like this are REALLY starting to get my goat.

Sorry, but I’m going to use large numbers of capital letters for a purpose other than acronyms. If you find them offensive, please stop reading, you have been warned.

APPLE: FULL SCREEN VNC IS *NOT* A PRO FEATURE FOR FROLICK’S SAKE!

It’s a feature required and wanted by practically anyone who uses an EFFING laptop to access their glorious BUT REMOTE computer at home with its Full High Definition screen. Or those need to access one Mac from another AT FULL SCREEN QUALITY WITHOUT GOLLYGOSHDARNITSTINKINGMUTHARUBBING SCALING!!!

IS IT SO FRICKIN’ MUCH TO ASK FOR BOUNCING BARNACLE’S SAKE?

Why is it on the PC I can have any resolution I choose, but with the Mac I’m stuck with a crappy frame grab of the whole fragging screen at full spiggotting resolution! For fume’s sake… (Can you tell I’m trying my best not to swear!)

Oh Blow it! I’m installing ARD… available for download from your nearest and dearest search engine.

Installing old ATI Rage Pro 128 video drivers from Tiger into Leopard on G4 Cube

Seeing the graphics benchmark results for Leopard being so slow, I got to wondering if it was the drivers which were affecting the performance. Perhaps the old ATI was unrecognised by Leopard.

First I checked the system profile on the Apple menu, but that showed that the graphics card was correctly recognised as ATI Rage Pro 128

Just in case, I checked the /System/Library/Extensions folder. There were no ATI Rage drivers there at all!

I hopped on over to OSX86 at Insanely Mac and read their forums, remembering my Hackintosh days of dragging drivers over and found that it was a trivial task.

Since I used Archive and Install so I had my whole Previous System folder available, I mosied on over to:

/Previous Systems/<somedate>/System/Library/Extensions

and grabbed all the ATIRage kexts bundles and plugins I could find.  I spotted the ATIcellerator, too so I brought that over to/System/Library/Extensions folder, also.

I had to change the permissions of the files, delete the old extensions cache and reboot.

This needs to be done as root (using sudo) so be careful, a mistyped command will be executed without complaint by your computer, potentially hosing your entire system.

In terminal, type:

sudo -s

type your password at the prompt and you are now root. You can seriously shag your system up if you’re not careful. So be careful 🙂

chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRage*.*
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
reboot

After the reboot I found that my system was much, and I mean that honestly, more responsive! The slow screen updates, windows resizes, dragging, Safari page scrolling, everything was much faster.

I imediately ran X Bench to see if the results reflected the performance differences I felt and here are the results:

 

A convincing win for Leopard with the Tiger driver installed! It is a shame that OpenGL performance is not affected, however.

Just to remind us, let’s have a look at Leopard running with Tiger’s ATI driver versus Tiger itself.

This is extremely interesting. It shows us surprisingly that far from having an overhead, Quartz graphics actually show a very slight increase in performance compared to Tiger (averaged over three runs)! Of course, X bench is fickle, so take this with a pinch of salt.

Unfortuantely, the OpenGL (spinning squares) test shows us that it not receiving any benefit from the new driver. That’s too bad.

Well, I can now reverse my original post with the following shout:

I CAN NOW HEARTILY RECOMMEND LEOPARD FOR ATI RAGE USERS WITH >1GB RAM AND A DECENT CPU!

Directly Install a shop copy of Leopard on an iMac 700MHz (or even a stock, unmodified G4 Cube!)

Yes, despite Leopard being limited to 867MHz G4 processors and faster, you can pretty much install Leopard on any G4 Mac with an AGP graphics card. (OK, so the picture above is a phtoshopped image of a 1GHz model, but you get the idea.)

So, I decided to try it out and reinstall Leopard from scratch on my shiny “new” iMac with its rip-roaring 700MHz processor, 40GB hard disk and 640MB RAM.

To cut a long story short, it can be done and ridiculously easily!

• Reboot the iMac
• Hold down the Cmd-Opt-O-F keys. Instead of the usual white screen and grey Apple logo, you’ll get a black screen with a white Open Firmware prompt.
• This is NOT a regular BASH prompt, so don’t be tempted to try anything!
• Insert the shop copy of the Leopard DVD. (If it’s already in the drive, that’s fine, too).
• Type the following lines in exactly as shown below. After pressing Return, you should see “ok” to signify that the command was understood. If at any time you have any doubt, just reset the Mac and start again since these settings are cleared after a reboot.

For your iMac, G4 Cube etc, type this:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

• The install will continue.

I haven’t tried this below, but…
If you have a dual CPU computer, use the following:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

• The install will continue.

Remember this hint does not confer any magical speed increase, it just lies to the Installer! Also, a reboot clears this tweak, But Leopard will continue to run, once installed.

Obvious point but… If you install a new OS, you’ll in all likelihood LOSE SOME OR ALL OF THE CONTENTS OF THE DRIVE. BACKUP FIRST!

Installing Leopard on iMac 700MHz with Target Disk Mode

I’ve seen a lot of talk about Leopard requiring the latest system just to get it running. So I’m writing to put that myth to sleep.

So, I decided to upgrade the RAM and the OS to either Tiger or Leopard and test the machine with original 40GB hard disk and just an additional 512MB upgrade (for a total of 640MB). If it ran Leopoard tolerably fast and stable enough then I’d make Leopard permanent and upgrade to the the full 1GB RAM, a Bigger Hard disk and a DVD-R, which should provide even better performance. If not then I’d fall back to Tiger rather than Leopard.

Preparing the iMac for the Leopard install.

This was trivial and involved adding a 512MB, 133MHz SODIMM RAM module.

    See the Upgrading the iMac’s RAM to 640 MB post.

• Next, I rebooted the iMac and tested the memory. All was well.

• Restart the iMac in Firewire Target Disk mode by holding down T until a few seconds after the chime.
• I used Firewire target disk mode and CCC to clone the HDD off Tomoko’s 12″ PowerBook Leopard install. This took about an hour for the 10GB or so transfer.

Booted up fine, first time.

Gotchas

After removing various settings for Bluetooth, Airmac and changing the network settings so as not to double up with the PowerBook, I got to work testing.

I was surprised at the performance, expecting it to be slower than it was and the 1024 x 768 screen to be more cramped. But it runs quite well. I tried Safari, Word, Excel and Mail at the same time (a typical day’s work) and found the machine to be pleasant and entirely usable if not amazingly fast. There were none of the annoyances that I have with Tiger on my stock G4 Cube, for example.

I found that the 10.5.2 system install was waiting so I installed that plus graphics update 1.0 and a few other queued updates.

Probably subjective, but I found the whole thing to be even smoother and more responsive. For example, clicking on the finder icon in the dock brings up any open finder windows almost instantaneously over whatever you’re doing at the time.

A lot better than my stock cube with 1.5GB RAM and Tiger.

I’d like to test it out with Tiger for a speed comparison, but quite frankly, besides the lack of awaking from sleep, it’s running so smooth that I don’t see the point.

In conclusion

• Install from cloned PowerBook HDD using CCC was effortless and took an hour or so for a 10GB install. 
• Leopard runs trouble free, with so far no crashes or random stuff happening (apart from wake from sleep).
• 10.5.2 upgrade and Graphics Update 1.0 work wonderfully.
• 640MB RAM and 40GB HDD gives more than adequate performance for Surfing, iTunes, Office 2004 multitasking.

Remaining Niggles:

1. Awakes from sleep with screen artifacts (but at least it can be gracefully reset since the OSX10.5.2 / GU1.0 updates).
2. Boot up is slow. Haven’t timed it, but it’s slow.
3. Logging in is slow.

Of the above complaints, only the first is a real one, since, once logged in, everything is hunky dory.

I think I’ll keep the machine like this for a week or to so that I can appreciate the upgrade when I perform it.

I wonder how much faster the Seagate 500GB HDD and extra 386MB of RAM will make it…

Installing Japanese Sony SonicStage on English Windows

Jan 2, 2009 -> Updated links to official Sony Web Site.

Background: You can skip this and get straight to the installation bit (which is a lot shorter).

I was unfortunate (or stupid) enough to lose the media software that came with my SO903i phone, which left me without a means of getting my music onto it after a sudden OS reinstall. According to the Sony Ericsson site, Sony SonicStage CP 4.3 now has the drivers built in to handle transferring music to the built in memory or to an external CF card. I hastily went to download the Japanese version of the software, only to get an error:

Cannot install with this Windows Language. (20993)

20993? Cool! So, I went to the US site and navigated through to the download page. Clicked on the ‘I accept’ button and got the beautiful:

This Download is only available within the US

US only. Sweet.”Ah-ha!” I thought… I can just proxy the download via a US server. So I did. The required download was only about 300Kb. So proxying didn’t slow anything down.I double clicked on the and after a lengthy 20Mb download…

Please wait while your software installs.

…message at last appeared! It installed perfectly and worked first time at importing the music I’d downloaded from http://www.eMusic.com into my library. “At last, I could use my phone again,” I thought…

Or could I?I plugged my gorgeous phone in, set it to memory mode and waited while the three drive letters appeared (one for the Internal memory, one for SD and one for overpriced Memory Stick).

“Right. Now for the music!” I searched for the transcode for mobile device button, but there was no rename/transcode the required format Nor was there any DB management for the CD jackets or other info.

Blast again, tripped at the last hurdle. And so my phone lay, mostly inert for the next three months or so.

Finally, I decided to do something.

 

How to install Japanese SonicStage on an English version of Windows

NB. This does not magically translate the program into English.

Download the SonicStage installer from Sony. Here’s a link for SonicStage 4.4

• http://www.sony.jp/support/pa_common/download/ss_dl_03.html

Scroll right down to the bottom and click the bright blue button that says 同意する.

Here’s a direct link for those who need it.

• http://sonicstage.update.sony.net/v4400/JP/SonicStageInstaller.exe
  

Save this file, don’t run it.

Now, you’ll need to install a good Zip program. I like WinRAR. With WinRAR, you can right click on SonicStageInstaller.exe and click “Extract Here”.

Among the files extracted should be a file called “SetupSS.ini”

Open SetupSS.ini in your favourite editor.

Here’s what you should see. (My file  is from SonicStage 4.3)

[Initialize]
fontname         =FONT_NAME
applicationname  =APPLICATION_NAME
applicationver   =4.3
supportos        =0xf8
language         =Japanese
supportoslang    =Japanese
nonsupportoslang =
schineseopt      =1
mainsection      =SdWelcome
dlmanager        =1
dlserver         =http://dl1.aii.co.jp/...
noaskopt         =0
instssver        =4.3.04
uninstomgver     =2.2
pacsupport       =

The key is the part which says “supportoslang”

Change that to read

supportoslang    =English

Save the file

Double Cick the extracted “SetupSS.exe” to Install.

During the installer, you may see some blank dialogue boxes. Just click 次へ　(next) until you reach the end of the installer.

As I mentioned, this will not translate the program into English, but it will run with full functionality, unlike the English language version of the program which lacks support for Japanese mobile phones like my Sony SO903i.

Aperture 1.5.4 on PPC Mac Mini G4

I have Aperture 1.5 running nicely on a Macbook but wanted to get it working on my Mini for times when the laptop is being used. I had it working before, but recently updated to 1.5.4 which broke it. After fishing around and with a bit of trial and error I found out how to get Aperture 1.5.4 working on a Mac Mini G4 with 64MB Radeon 9200 graphics and 1Gb of RAM.

1. Install Aperture and Upgrade/Update to 1.5.4.
2. Download 0xED HEX Editor from Apple (0xED page) and install
3. Run 0xED and use File | Open menu to Navigate to /Applications/Aperture/Contents/MacOS andd open Aperture
4. Make sure 0xED is in Overwrite mode by pressing Shift+Command+O
5. Use the “Go to Offset” field to jump to BFC8
6. Change the next four bytes from 40 9E 00 88 -> 48 00 00 80
7. Do the same for C064 and you’re done

This works for my setup. If you are using an older machine or one with less RAM, you may want to edit the Info.plist from /Applications/Aperture/Contents to change AELMinimumRAMSize, RKG4LaptopMinimumCPUSpeedMHz or RKG5DesktopMinimumCPUSpeedMHz parameters.

Thanks tothe minimum.cx site for setting me off in the right direction!