Much as I find Apple people annoying, I like Cupertino hardware a great deal. With the move to Intel hardware the UNIX-like Mac OS X finally has room to stretch its legs too.

If Macs are essentially PCs, which in turn is a standardised platform that runs Windows, Linux and BSDs happily, could you not run Mac OS X on anything? If you really want to know, head down the ”Hackintosh„ route - running Mac OS X on hardware that isn't Apple-made. Make sure before you begin that you're armed with a good amount of technical nous and even more patience.

A word of warning right from the start though: getting a Hackintosh up and running can be seriously Deep Geek. I’ve tried Hackintoshes before and while I admire the community effort going into working around Apple’s quirks and foibles, I came away realising they’re not for average users.

For starters, OS X uses the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) rather than the BIOS used by most PCs. This means you have to use a boot loader such as Chameleon to emulate EFI, and also make sure that your BIOS settings are correct with Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) for storage and the 64-bit High Precision Event Timer (HPET) enabled. If they’re not, you get a kernel panic when you boot up OS X. What’s more, under certain conditions OS X resets your BIOS by clearing the CMOS.

That’s not the end of the FLAs though. OS X uses ACPI - the Advanced Control and Power Interface - like PCs to set up devices. The important part of ACPI is the Differentiated System Description Table, or DSDT, that tells OS X what the base system is. The DSDT is stored in the BIOS of the computer, and you can grab it, disassemble and recompile it with freely available tools to make sure your hardware is recognised by OS X.

Some hardware can be animated by using drivers, which are called Kernel Extensions or Kexts. Many Hackintosh installations load the operating system, and then you head over to aites such as kexts.com or tonymacx86.com, or even insanelymac.com and snag some drivers. I did say you need to be intimately acquainted with your hardware, didn’t I? Not just that, but you also need a large amount of reading and Googling detailed information and potential problems before you install anything.

Install the wrong Kext or DSDT, and boom, kernel panic strikes. In previous Hackintosh setups, this used to happen each time you fired up Software Update, unless you took precautions and manually upgraded stuff.

However, this time around there is an easy way. The excellent Kakewalk [kakewalk.se] set of scripts will do all the heavy lifting for you, provided you make sure to use a compatible motherboard. Gigabyte boards seem to be popular with Hackintoshers, and I happened to have a spare EX58-UD4 model handy, with a 3.2GHz Core i7.

Cutting a huge saga short, Kakewalk 4.0.1 extracted the necessary disk image from the copy of OS X 10.7 Lion that I plonked down $39 for, added a boot loader, hardware drivers and installed everything to a bootable, 8GB USB stick.

Installing Lion on the Hackintosh machine took maybe an hour all in all and afterwards everything worked aside from the audio and the ability to put the computer to sleep. The first problem was easily solved with a VoodooHDA driver, but the second was trickier as Apple’s CPU power management driver doesn’t like PC ACPI implementations and has to be disabled. Getting this to work requires DSDT work.

It’s not impossible however, and after a bit of trial and error plus the obligatory kernel panics, I had a Mac Pro-like Hackintosh. Fast and stable, I can almost pretend I’ve got a Mac Pro if I don’t look too closely at the fairly ugly tower case and the PC keyboard that’s awkward to use with OS X. Because Apple’s OS X code is left alone, you can now run Software Update without too many worries.

Provided you’re willing to put in the huge effort, are Hackintoshes legal? I can’t tell for sure: the underlying operating system is Darwin which is free and open software, and the same goes for the XNU kernel, which incorporates Mach, FreeBSD and NetBSD code.

But, despite being FOSS-based, Apple’s end-user licence says you can’t install, use or run OS X on non-Apple-labelled hardware. Any commercial use is an absolute no-no: Apple has cracked down on commercial Hackintosh operations like PsyStar in the past, and will do so again.

That said, word amongst the OS X x86 crowd is that Apple doesn’t care that much about amateur Hackintosh-ery. I imagine this is because it’s hard to imagine anyone bar myself and a small band of techies with a masochistic bent actually putting together a Hackintosh and getting it up and running.

Everybody else will happily continue to sell both their kidneys for that lovely, tested and stable hardware that just works, and I totally understand why.

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Recently, I’ve had to deal with files of sizes in the region of 50-100BGB, whereas normally a big file would be 2-5GB or so. The problems that you’d expect with this kind of file size is in opening them, compressing and uncompressing them and moving them.

The Xeon W3550 CPU and 12GB of DDR-3 RAM in my HP Z400 workstation crunch through those gigabytes of data without breaking a sweat. Ditto the new SATA-3 OCZ Vertex 3 solid state drive with its 550Mbyte/s reads and writes. Compressing and decompressing even massive files is fast thanks to the quick I/O and multi-core processor ripping through the files in no time at all.

Moving or backing up the data to other systems or external drives over the network or an external bus is another story. 'Painfully slow' describes the situation the best. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be anything affordable on the horizon that’ll make things go faster, not for a while at least.

For example, the 802.11n Wi-Fi connection in the computer reckons it’s talking to the router at 270Mbit/s which is amazingly good. Unfortunately, that translates into real-life performance of 95-110Mbit/s which is horribly inefficient. Move away from the Wi-Fi access point or have other devices join in and share the bandwidth and the speed halves.

The spotty performance of Wi-Fi today doesn’t fill me with confidence that new wireless technologies such as 60GHz WiGig will deliver anything near the promised 6-7Gbit/s. Besides, with a reach of a mere ten-fifteen metres and the high signal frequency providing poor penetration of walls and objects, it’ll be curious to see how useful the likes of WiGig are in reality.

Going cabled via a USB 2.0 external drive isn’t much better. The over-optimistic 480Mbps including overhead that the technology promises shrinks down to 25-35Mbyte/s and that’s a best-case scenario as well. The new backwards-compatible USB 3.0 standard promises a dizzying 5Gbps peak speed and you can expect something like 200Mbyte/s throughput with fast devices and ideal conditions.

This is good stuff, as it’s almost twice as fast as 1Gbit/s Ethernet. However, it’s not as quick as even a 3Gbit/s SATA port, let alone the new 6Gbit/s ones, and USB 3.0 drives are still fairly rare and small (I don’t have one).

I suspect some of the above were the reasons behind Apple’s decision to use Intel’s new Thunderbolt interface, which provides 10Gbit/s speeds. Not just in one direction, but both up and down, for a total of 20Gbit/s. Plus, you can run displays off a Thunderbolt cable. That requires active cabling with transceivers at each however, and so far the only major manufacturer using Thunderbolt is… Apple. Nobody else seems interested, which is a shame as Thunderbolt speeds are what we should be expecting right now.

While I am totally impressed that Intel’s getting 20Gbps out of copper over three metres, was more interested in Thunderbolt’s first incarnation, Light Peak. At the Intel Developers Forum demo some two years ago, Light Peak was shown off pushing data and high definition video streams over thirty metres of optical connection.

In optical form, Light Peak is supposed to scale up to 100Gbps. Couple that with the possibility to run long cable lengths and you have, in my mind at least, a winner. Maybe an expensive one but dammit, would you say no to 100Gbit/s transfer rates?

Ideally though, I’d like to keep everything networked and not futz around with external devices. My LAN’s been gigabit-ised since 2004 and everyone’s network should be at least that fast in 2011. When I first installed gigabit Ethernet NICs, motherboard chip sets simply weren’t fast enough to drive them, ditto hard drives. It’s not until lately with gigabit Ethernet interfaces being connected to PCI-Express buses and fast drives that I’m able to hit 110-120Mbyte/s.

Now, if I could upgrade to 10Gbit Ethernet, and scale performance accordingly, I’d be happy and have some margin for the future. In fact, I expected to be at 10GE by now, but that technology still isn’t at affordable levels even though the specification was fixed in 2006.

Installing 10GE would give the same reach as 1GE, or around 100 metres over copper unshielded twisted pair albeit with new, Category 6A cabling that looks like a pain to install. Cat 6A cable also happens to be really expensive, costing up to three times as much as Cat 5E which I normally use. Switches and NICs are also very pricey, and Intel is doggedly sticking with 1GE on their roadmaps, possibly because it’d be difficult to furnish the full 1.25Gbyte/s that 10GE can handle at consumer pricing levels.

What this means is that 10GE isn’t likely to come out of the data centre any time soon, leaving our LANs as the bottleneck. Given that we store more and more data on our terabyte and bigger drives and want to share that, this is something vendors should remedy sooner rather than later.

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

As far as some people are concerned, they’ve got something that has worked for the last ten years, so why fix what isn’t broken - at least in their minds.

Some years ago, I agreed to modernise the IT solution at accountancy practice. The need to modernise hadn’t come about due to curiosity about new tech and a desire to evaluate if it’d make life easier and more productive.

The brief that omitted many of the points a system integrator needs to know for a successful migration. Before long, the modernisation turned into a nightmare mission - the gap between the old system and the new was huge.

I won’t go into the ‘fun’ I had trying to migrate data from a locked file format with its root in the late eighties, but I still remember some things that I wasn’t able to convince the client to upgrade.

The practice used the internet to send and receive data to and from government agencies like the Companies Office. I thought that was a great start to boosting productivity, but then I learnt the process took place overnight… over a modem connection.

Night time transfers were necessary because the practice had to use the modem connection for other things during the day. If the transfers failed - and they often did - it was a matter of restarting it the next night. Clients had to wait for things to be filed and processed, just as they had to hold on for email responses from the practice - the messages were downloaded and replied to once a week.

At the time, DSL had come down in price and an entry-level plan was entirely affordable for the practice. I tried to explain the benefits of an always-on connection that was much faster than dial-up: increased productivity and happier clients. Another benefit, for them and me was that I could even do maintenance remotely if they used DSL.

All my arguments were in vain. The practice felt dial-up was enough and soon afterwards signed up for a two-year fixed contract that cost almost as much as DSL. A telco rep had convinced the practice that DSL was too fast for its needs and threw in some reduced-cost toll calling to sweeten the deal - even though most practice’s clients were in the same city.

Even when you point out obvious benefits, there’s still an odd fear of fast broadband around. One person I spoke to said moving to a fast connection would be like getting a Ferrari and who needs that?

That person had a new-ish Intel laptop with a powerful Core processor and a fast, cavernous SATA hard disk. That’s a ‘Ferrari’, too. So why would this person not opt for a broadband ‘Ferrari’ instead of the Yugo copper broadband most of us have and will continue to have until the UFB comes into play six years from now.

Much of the fear of the fast comes from successful marketing propaganda campaigns that tells us broadband is a limited resource where each bit has to be doled at steep charges.

Marketing people don’t tell customers that technological advances have made it much cheaper to deliver much faster broadband to everyone, and in greater volumes. This so much the case that artificial constraints for speeds and data caps have been introduced to create segmentation.

The newspeak term for this is ”product and service differentiation„ which means that instead of getting broadband connections that go as fast as the technology allows, the brakes are put on it to different degrees. The more you pay, the less the brake is applied.

Remember, we’re talking about the same product here, in different guises. Same bits and bytes, same network pipe and gear, but on one plan, they cost more than on another.

In other words, you have a perverse situation in which money and effort is spent on slowing down broadband to create ”entry level„ products. I would imagine that the cost of slowing down broadband service is recouped elsewhere, such as from already expensive premium plans.

The notion that artificial constraints are necessary is my biggest disappointment with the government’s Ultra-Fast Broadband project. It’s been done to encourage private companies to invest by creating a market similar to today’s, through the artificial segmentation of broadband.
Distorting the market by creating slow 30/10Mbit/s plans to be used in five years’ time when the world’s infrastructure is capable of 1Gbit/s today is denying the obvious, which is that we’re in the Age of Plenty - when it comes to broadband at least.

This market-constructed vision is not just blinkered but also one that shows a lack of understanding of technology. Sadly, we’re paying for it, and we didn’t have any real say in the process either. Welcome to your UFB.

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )