Joseph McLaughlin's Weblog

My New Website

josephmclaughlin — Mon, 26 May 2008 02:15:44 +0000

Over the weekend I set up my new website and imported all the current posts. Please visit it here.

Thanks and I hope you enjoy!

Wubi Error: Busybox and initramfs

josephmclaughlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 23:58:55 +0000

ATTENTION: This post is out of date, for the more recent solution/information go to this post.

After installing Ubuntu using Wubi, everything worked fine for a few days. After a few days I booted up and was greeted with a terminal-like screen called a BusyBox. After scouring the ubuntu forums and finding several posts explaining how to read the error logs and what-not. All of these “solutions” did not help.

Do I have a solution?

Yes. Boot up into windows and shut down normally. DO NOT HARD RESET! (that’s what’s causing the problem) After windows shuts down, attempt to boot back into ubuntu, it should work this time.

The reason I think it wasn’t working was because when you hard reset your computer you cut all power, therefore disallowing linux to access it’s virtual disk when you start up. If i’m wrong on anything I’ve said, please comment and tell me. Also, if this works for anybody, I’d love to find out. Don’t be afraid to comment!

Using Wubi to Essentially Triple-Boot Your Mac

josephmclaughlin — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:24:20 +0000

“Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way.” - http://wubi-installer.org/

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 yesterday on my Bootcamp partition so that I had three operating systems installed without touching the Apple boot loader. In this post I will walk you through all the steps necessary to achieve this feat.

Install Windows XP (or Vista if you prefer) on a boot camp partition using Boot Camp Assistant in Leopard. This is a fairly simple process with one caveat: you may have to re-install/restore your machine. The reason? Your Mac’s hard drive may become fragmented with large files and the mini-defragmenter included in the boot camp assistant doesn’t have the strength to move the files. This is very simple to do via time machine, just back up your entire hard drive (the small backups don’t work) and when you are reinstalling, go to Tools > Restore From Backup.

Install Ubuntu. This needs to be done inside the partition you created in the last step. First, insert an Ubuntu 8.04 CD (you can download one from here), choose “Install on Windows” and you will come to a screen like this. Enter all the settings as you would like them and click install. After a little while you will get a screen like this. Choose “Reboot now”. As your computer is rebooting: Hold down the option/alt key until you come to a white screen with two hard drives, one labeled yourharddrivename and the other one Windows HD. Click on the arrow below Windows HD, It will start to boot into windows where you will be faced with another option: boot into windows or ubuntu. For now, choose Ubuntu. The Ubuntu installer will now finish the install.

There we go. You have now triple booted your mac. If you have any questions about this or any other posts send me an email.

Note: If you use VMWare Fusion or Parallels you can also open the boot camp partition and choose either windows or linux.

Hiding an Application Icon from Macs’ Dock

josephmclaughlin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:51:41 +0000

Do you have a mac? Have you ever wanted an application to be hidden from the dock, even when it’s running, but there’s no option to do so? Follow these simple steps and you will have a hidden application.

Navigate to the application in Finder (Usually ~/Applications/)
Right-click (or control-click) on the application and select “Show Package Contents”
Open Contents/info.plist
Find a line that looks like:
- NSUIElement
If it doesn’t exist, enter these two lines right before the tag:
- NSUIElement 1
Save the file and (re)start the program.
You’re done!

CSS Gradients

josephmclaughlin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:38:34 +0000

After hunting and pecking for a way to effectively implement a background gradient without an image (because it poses a scrolling problem, see below), I came up empty. UNLESS you are using (in my opinion) worst internet browser ever created: Internet Explorer, but that’s the topic of another post. The point is there is no way to implement a gradient with simple CSS. I think that this feature should be implemented but that’s just me.

As mentioned above, using an image you run into a problem when the page is longer then the original image (if you’re repeating width-wise) or wider then the original image (if you’re repeating length-wise).

Bottom line: we need a gradient CSS hack/implementation.

Quicksilver

josephmclaughlin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:10:03 +0000

This is must have for every mac user! It is generally used as an application launcher but has several addition features. Go ahead and download the current version here. Enjoy!