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I am gearing up for a large consulting engagement, and I needed to move two virtual machines created with VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro to VMware Server on my Lenovo Thinkpad. When I did this, and tried to start them, I crashed vmware-hostd.exe.

To fix the situation, you will need to edit the *.vmx file with a text editor and remove the following line:

serial0.fileType = “thinprint”

VMware Server does not support this feature, and crashes when you try to import the virtual machine. Before your virtual machine can be started, you will need to go into the Services and restart the VMware Host Service.

When I first moved to Mac OS X, I knew I would have to figure out how to do a screen capture. This is done in the Windows PC world by ALT+Print Screen to capture the active window, or Shift+Print Screen to capture the entire desktop.

There are several ways in the Mac OS X world to do the same thing. Here are a few suggestions:

To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

To copy the entire desktop, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program. This is equivalent to Shift+Print Screen in Windows.

To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop. You can also press Command-Control-Shift-4 to get the same functionality as ALT+Print Screen

You can also use a built-in program called Grab, which is located by default under Applications –> Utilities. Grab saves captures by default in TIFF format, and is more robust by doing things such as timed captures and capturing mouse activity.

VMware has announced that VMware Fusion 3, the next major release of its virtualization solution for running Windows, Linux, and other operating systems on Intel-powered Macs, will ship on October 27. The new version ($80, with an upgrade available for $40) promises more than 50 new features, including changes designed to make it run well in Snow Leopard. The virtualization engine in Fusion 3 is completely 64-bit native, and will run in 64-bit mode under both Leopard and Snow Leopard for users of 64-bit-CPU-equipped Macs.

Fusion 3 also offers greatly improved graphics support, including support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3. For the first time in Fusion, users will be able to use the “Aero” visual effects in both Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

Users of physical Windows machines looking to move to Fusion 3 on the Mac will find the task has been greatly simplified. A small program on the physical PC is first run, which generates a four-digit code. Users then move to the Mac and run the migration assistant, which will ask for the four-digit code. After providing the code, the Mac will find the physical Windows PC, and set up an identical virtual machine—all without any user intervention.

Fusion Unity mode—whereby the Windows desktop is hidden and Windows applications and windows appear alongside those of OS X—has also been improved over its predecessor. Users will be able to switch between windows of a Windows application using Command-`, as they can in OS X. Windows application icons in the Dock will show a list of open windows when clicked, just like OS X applications in the Dock. You can even use Dock Exposé in Snow Leopard to show just the windows associated with a particular Windows application. Finally, a new Fusion menu bar icon provides access to the items in the Start Menu and on the Task Bar, along with some other often-used tasks.

VMware has worked toward improved performance throughout the application, reducing memory usage where possible and adding small refinements. Dragging windows in Unity mode will be notably faster than before, and CPU usage is lower than it was previously. Users will be able to copy and paste not just text but graphics as well between Windows and OS X. Fusion 3 will support multiple cores in virtual machines, as opposed to the multiple CPUs supported in Fusion 2. Virtual machines will also launch more quickly than they did in Fusion 2.

On the front end, the new virtual machine library overview window loads faster, and shows real time views of your virtual machines—even if its windows are hidden or it’s running in Unity mode. A new simplified interface makes it easier for users to create new virtual machines and handle other routine tasks. Finally, application updates are built right into the program, so users won’t need to visit the web site to download updates.

For those who need technical support, Fusion 3 will offer 18 months of free e-mail tech support (up from 30 days for the current product), as well as the option of $29 per incident phone support—a service option that wasn’t available at all with Fusion 2.

Users can pre-order the full $80 version of VMware Fusion 3 from VMware’s site, the Apple Online Store, and Amazon.com starting Tuesday. Upgrades from prior versions will be available for $40 on October 27 at vmware.com, as well as at all authorized resellers.

Source – Macworld.com

While I have owned a Macbook Pro for almost 2 years now, I did dabble (and occasionally still do) in trying to run various flavors of Mac OS X on Intel hardware. I successfully had the Kalyway version of 10.5.2 running on my Dell Latitude D610 laptop, though I could never get the external VGA monitor to work, even with a rigged paper clip to short the pin out.

Anyway, I came across this link at osx86project.org to run OS X under VMware. This was immediately interesting to me, as I have been on a mission to eliminate hardware as much as possible, thereby cutting my electricity bill and carbon footprint.

If you use Windows Servers and Mac OS X in the same environment and share files, more than likely you have encountered seeing a bunch of .DS_Store files and files that start with ._ on your Windows file servers and SMB shares.

There are several ways you can take care of this on both the Mac OS X client and the Windows Server side.

On your Mac OS X, you can prevent creation of .DS_Store files by opening Terminal and typing the following command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

You will need to hit return and restart your Mac for changes to take effect.

More information is detailed in the following KB article from Apple Support.

On your Windows Server, there are a variety of tools, scripts and utilities you can use to both run through your drive and delete these files or even monitor in real-time for their creation and deletion. One easy way to do this is to write a simple batch file to delete these files.

The batch file would look something like this, assuming you wanted to clean up Drive H:

@ECHO OFF
:: DotClean version 0.1
:: 9/20/2009
:: breednet.net – any rights reserved, but free to use and enjoy
::
:: Deleting DS_Store and dot underscores from removable drives H: and I:

ECHO Cleaning up Mac DS_Store files on Drive H: …
del /q /s “H:\*.DS_Store”

ECHO Cleaning up Mac “dot underscore” files on Drive H: …
del /q /s “H:\._*”

You can also run a VBScript on your Windows server to detect and delete the file creation in real-time. There is a great article here that covers this, as well as the source code for DotUnderscore.vbs.