It’s got friggin’ Unity for Linux!!! This looks good…
The VMWare team has just released the second beta for VMWare Fusion 2.0, the company’s popular virtualization program for the Mac.
The new beta adds a TON of new features, as the video above demonstrates. I got a chance to talk to VMWare today about the new beta and it is HOT. I’ll be posting a more in-depth overview tomorrow, but until then, here are some of the highlights:
- Unity 2.0 - The newest version of Fusion is really focused on better Windows-Mac integration. You can now launch Windows programs from the dock or access Mac programs from within your virtual machine. You can also link folders like Documents, Pictures and Music on your virtual machine with those folders on your Mac.
- Multiple Snapshots VMWare has worked really hard to bring a Time Machine-like ease to backing up and protecting your virtual machine. You can now designate how often you want to take full system snapshots of your VM, whether once an hour, once a day or once a week, and how many copies you want to keep.
- Better Video and Graphics Graphics and shading support has been improved for Macs that have higher-end graphics cards, and even integrated Macs can now play 1080p HD video in virtual machines with considerably less CPU overhead.
- Support for more client OSs, including Leopard Server You can now run Leopard Server as a VM in OS X 10.4 and 10.5, even on client machines (virtualizing Mac OS X client is blocked by Apple’s license terms). Support for the latest version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) is also available right out of the box with Unity integration. Power users can now designate up to four virtual CPUs per virtual machine, which is great for anyone wanting to take an XServe or Mac Pro to the next level.
VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta 2 is available for Intel Macs running OS X 10.4 or OS X 10.5. New users can try the beta for free and the upgrade path (including future betas and the full version of Fusion 2.0) is free for all existing Fusion 1.0 customers.
via TUAW
A great little command-line tool for Leopard:
osx-trash manipulates the Mac OS X trash from the command line, just like the Finder does. It uses AppleScript via Scripting Bridge on top of to communicate with the Finder. You can move files to the trash, empty the trash, and list items currently in the trash.
project page via
If you’re a VMware user and want to play around with the latest version of Ubuntu in a VM (like me), you’ll need to get the vmware-tools installed. Unfortunately, things are not quite as straight forward as the previous release of Ubuntu yet, but it was a pretty easy thanks to this great guide.
The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04 a.k.a. Ubuntu Hardy - the world’s most popular Linux distribution) came out yesterday on April 24th. I downloaded it right away to play with on VMware Fusion, my Mac virtualization tool of choice (though I’ve now been told this works in VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too!). It worked pretty well out of the box, with even seamless mouse support working right away, but I needed, of course, to install VMware Tools too, as any good VMware user would do. From there, things turned sour, and I was bombarded with error messages …
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I’m already a lover of Spanning Sync, version 2 promises to have contact syncing between all your Google apps with the Mac address book. This could be very very good. Check the link for a video of it in action.
People know Spanning Sync for its ability to sync Apple iCal with Google Calendar. In fact, more than 70,000 people have used Spanning Sync to do just that. But calendars are only one part of the equation.
Our users tell us that they also need to be able to sync their Mac Address Book with their contacts in Gmail and Google Apps. So Spanning Sync 2.0 does both—calendars and contacts.
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A great guide to help you in not getting things done. 
Sure, we’ve all read those lists of tweaks you can make to your system to increase productivity, but what if you’re not in such an all-fired hurry to get things done? What if you’re already plenty efficient, and actually need to slow things down a bit until that five o’clock whistle blows? Well, lucky for you, we’ve compiled a list of the top ten best ways to slow down your system, and decrease productivity. Please feel free to add your favorites in the comments. (Oh, and we by no means recommend you do any of these to your friends’ computers, even if it IS April 1st).
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Found this via a post on Digg. A very useful read if you want to get some more advanced things done in Unix.
This document is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing.
full article
I don’t give many presentations these days, but this is a great tip:
If you give many presentations on the Mac, chances are you’re using Apple’s Keynote presentation software. One cool feature in Keynote is the ability to demo something on your Mac without giving away your next slide or notes. When you’re in the middle of a presentation, just hit the “h” key on your keyboard. This will hide the entire Keynote application and show your desktop.
When you press the h key, the Keynote icon in the dock will change and include a play button. When you want to resume your presentation, just click the Keynote icon in the dock.
via
Finally, a common sense response to all of these MacBook Air bashing articles. I admit - I don’t want one, i’d rather have a ‘regular’ MacBook or a MacBook Pro, but there are people out there that would want something like this…
Direct from the Canadian Ministry of Silly Punditry we learn that the MacBook Air may increase risk of laptop loss (tip o’ the antlers to Colin Morton).
Indeed. The only way to ensure your laptop won’t get stolen is to buy big fat honkin’ ugly ones.
But, clearly, neither of those beats this gem from PC World’s Mike Barton:
MacBook Air Amiss: Time to License Mac OS X?
Good question! Like “I Have Stubbed My Toe And Find It Painful: Time to Commit Suicide?”
via
SSH is a great tool for remotely accessing another machine, but entering your password every time you log into a remote box can be a pain if you would like to set-up some background scripts to connect to a server and do something (i.e. a backup script running as a cron job). Here’s how I set-up my Mac to be able to log into my server without the need for a password to be entered each time - the instructions should be good for any variant of Unix/Linux, but you need to take into account path names etc. on your machine.
Continue reading ‘SSH Shared-Key Setup - SSH Logins Without Passwords’
I’m a bit of a command-line freak and like to spend a fair amount of time with the terminal open… As such I like to spend a small amount of time getting the terminal set-up nicely. Other than changing the default colour scheme and font, one (slightly) more drastic change is to replace the standard implementation of ls for one that is slightly more configurable.
The default ls on OS X comes from BSD and compared to the GNU/Linux alternative is slightly lacking when it comes to comes to changing how things look - so what I like to do is replace it with the GNU ls available in MacPorts - this allows me to get a terminal setup like below:
Continue reading ‘A Better Ls for Mac OS X’
