Install Mac OS X Snow Leopard in VMWARE Windows 7 Edition

How to install Snow Leopard in VMWARE 7 and Windows host ? Virtualization of Snow Leopard (Client) is not officially supported/allowed by any virtualization solution. However a few modifications to the .vmx file and use a modified install disk as this will save a lot of trouble. Let me clear Apple licensing does not allow for the virtualization of OSX Client on any hardware and only allows for the virtualization OSX server on Apple hardware. Anything else is in violation of the license agreement. This article is for informational purposes only, you can never achieve full utilization of Mac OS X on VMWARE. So if you like the Mac then go ahead and buy a Mac.

Requirements

• VMWARE 7 and Windows XP, Vista or 7
• Retail DVD of Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6
• Intel Based Machine, AMD isn’t supported.
• Patience, a Cup of coffee or Energy drink whatever you like.
• A pre-made Snow Leopard VMDK, dariwn_snow.iso Download (Rapidshare), (Mediafire) Or (Megaupload) 

Instructions

Step One : Launch VMWARE Workstation and load the .vmx that came with the package you downloaded above. Now edit virtual machine settings for advance options.

 

Step Two : Edit the VMWARE settings eg: Memory, Processor, Networking Adaptors etc. Select CD/DVD drive options and in Connection select Use ISO image file and browse the Darwin_Snow.iso

 

Step Three : Now power on the virtual machine and keep your finger on F8 key.

 

Hit F8 very quickly on your Keyboard you will be prompted with the following screen

Step Four : Like Boot 132 method now you need to replace the boot cd with the Snow Leopard Retail Install DVD. Right click on the CD icon in bottom of the VMWARE windows and click on Settings option.

Now change the options from ISO image to use physical drive and make sure you have Retail DVD already installed.

Save and Exit

Step Five : Now navigate to boot screen and press “C” on your keyboard to select “Boot DVD”, again press F8 for advance options and type -v at the boot prompt then hit enter for booting with verbose mode.

Step Six : Now wait for 2-3 minutes and your Installation screen will appear. Now you can install Snow Leopard as usual.  Before choosing the destination open Disk Utility and erase your Vmware HDD in to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” format type. Under customization deselect printer drivers and language translations for trouble free installation.Once installation finishes your virtual machine will reboot automatically.

Step Seven : Follow Step Two again “Select CD/DVD drive options and in Connection select Use ISO image file and browse the Darwin_Snow.iso” now you can boot in to Snow Leopard you may need to force restart 2-3 times if Kernel Panic happens, once machine boot successfully you can set your preference etc.

 

That's it.  Comments encouraged. 

How does Facebook Make Money ?

They say its free. They also say that Mark Zuckerberg – the guy who started Facebook – is one of the richest people around – a billionaire apparently. So how the hell does this guy give free accounts to its users and yet sit happily atop a goldmine? The figures going around about Facebook's annual revenue are heart-stopping to say the least. The numbers that did the rounds were all around the US$ 500 million mark, which means that since 2007, they've been more or less doubling their revenue. All this from a free website! So where is the money coming from? This article will answer the question, how does Facebook make money and solve the mystery for you.

How Facebook Makes Money?

Free account notwithstanding, Facebook is making money. And lots of it. How does Facebook make money? If only you knew how does Facebook work financially!

Ads

I'll solve the mystery for you in one simple word – ads. The same thing that runs most websites across the world. That is the big secret behind Facebook's burgeoning revenue. If you open your Facebook profile, you  will see that the while right hand side of the page is full of ads. You can give the thumbs up to the ad or the thumbs down. The thumbs down will remove the ad and it will not come back.

How do these ads work? Well Facebook being a decidedly smart social networking institution knows which ad to put where. Like the Google AdSense, Facebook too provides ad to the pages based on the interests and the overall profile of the user. So, if you mention in your profile that you are a fan of Nike or any other sportswear brand, the related ads will appear on the right hand side of the page for companies and websites selling them. Facebook ads are not intrusive and hence people do not get annoyed with them, unlike we do with those super-irritating pop-up ads.

And their advertising system makes sense, since it ensures that the right ad is displayed to the right customer, since the ads are selected for an individual page based on the interests and likes of the user. This avoids unnecessary waste of adspace on the page where the chances of the ad being 'hit' are theoretically pretty low. Also, the ad system of Facebook, gives the user a 'thumbs down' option, which ensures that the particular ad does not appear again. That too is a pretty interesting thought, given that the ad hasn't a chance of being clicked and letting it sit in front of the users will continue to rile them.

Facebook Gifts

Ever sent a virtual gift on someone's birthday? You must have at some point, if you knew how to use Facebook. Well you do pay for some of them and a big slice of it goes into coffers of the company. While simply writing 'happy birthday' suffices for some, the 'send a gift tab' on your friend's wall encourages others to send a virtual gift – paid for online. All the money almost always goes to the company, but if the gift is provided by an outsider, then a portion of it goes there. But much of it is still retained by the website.

Application Performance

The beautiful thing about companies like these which work on different platform are the plethora of business ideas that they bring to the table. Performance advertising is a unique answer to how does Facebook make money. Let us take the example of Farmville, which is doing reasonably well on Facebook. Now the application is provided free for use for the users of Facebook and the parent company (Zynga) is getting a lot of traffic because of the game's popularity on Facebook. So isn't Facebook entitled to take a slice of that pie? After all, they are providing a platform for gaming companies like Zynga to their burgeoning user base. So Facebook makes a bit of money there too, as a 'rental' for using their users.

I guess that answers your questions about what is Facebook and how does it work and how does Facebook make money. Now this information on how Facebook makes money is largely speculative. Facebook is a privately held company and has the complete liberty to not disclose their financial details – and they don't disclose their revenues and the sources of their revenues either.

Partition a USB Flash Drive in Windows XP

One way to Partition a USB Flash Drive from Windows XP and mark it active "bootable". Windows detects Flash Drives as "Removable Disks" and flash drives are typically shipped formatted as a "Super Floppy" (USB-FDD without a partition table) . The Windows built in format utility cannot create a partition table on Removable Disks. Furthermore, the diskpart utility in Windows XP will not allow you to partition Removable Media, although diskpart does work for partitioning a Flash Drive from Windows Vista/7.

To address the inability to Partition a Flash Drive in Windows XP, you need to use a third party low level partitioning tool such as BOOTICE, created by Pauly. BOOTICE Home Page

Note: I partition my flash drives as USB-HDD (with a partition table), simply because my computers support booting from Flash Drives formatted to be seen as a USB Hard Disk.

One way to Partition a Flash Drive from Windows

1. Download BOOTICE, unzip, and run BOOTICE.EXE
2. Make sure your "USB Flash Drive" is set as the Destination Disk
3. Click Parts Manage 
4. Click ReFormat USB Disk
5. Select USB-HDD mode, and click Next 
6. Select Format as Fat32, and click OK

FIGURES :

You should now have an active "bootable" USB-HDD Fat32 formatted Flash Drive, containing a partition table with a single partition. You should be able to Boot It as a Hard Drive.

Restore GRUB2 after installing Windows

How I Restored GRUB2 after a Windows 7 Install. GRUB2 (Grand Unified Bootloader)  is a universal bootloader used by Ubuntu and other Linux Distributions. If you have a Linux Distribution installed on a partition, and attempt to  install Windows alongside it, your GRUB bootloader will be overwritten by the Windows bootloader, and your computer will only boot into Windows.

Recovering the GRUB2 Bootloader after a Windows Install  is simple. When finished, your Bootloader should detect all installed Operating Systems and automatically add a bootable menu item for each of them.

Note: This GRUB2 Installation process assumes that a Linux Partition still exists. If you overwrote Linux with Windows, this tutorial will not work for you, as there is no Linux system to recover boot.

How to Restore GRUB2 after installing Windows:

1. Boot from an Ubuntu Live CD or Live USB
2. Once up and running, Open a Terminal 
3. Type sudo su (press enter after typing each command)
4. Type fdisk -l 
5. 
6. Note which device contains your Linux partition (IE: /dev/sda1) 
7. Type mount /dev/sdx# /mnt (replacing x# with your actual device and partition number)
8. Type mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
9. Type mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
10. Type cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf
11. Type chroot /mnt
12.  
13. Type grub-install --recheck /dev/sdx (replacing x with your actual device)
14. Type reboot (to reboot your PC) 

Make sure to remove your Live USB or CD. Upon reboot you should be presented with a GRUB2 menu. However, Windows is missing. Now, I show you how to fix that.


Making GRUB 2 detect Windows Installs:

1. Proceed to boot into your Linux environment.
2. Open a terminal and type sudo update-grub (enter your root password when prompted) 

If all went well, grub should have updated it's menu entries to reflect what it detected. Including existing Windows partitions.