Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Microsoft IntelliMouse for Bluetooth on Mac OS X Tiger

It has long been talked about: Microsoft IntelliMouse for Bluetooth and Mac OS X.

I can confirm 2 things for you:
1) the IntelliMouse DOES work with Mac OS X. And its dongle works in Mac OS X too. However, since the dongle is Bluetooth 2.0, it only works in Tiger, not Panther. And it's right, you don't need special drivers, Mac recognize it.
2) The dongle does NOT support headset profile. Hardware wise not. While in Windows, the MS driver does not tell you if this is a driver problem or a hardware issue. Mac tells you right a way. "The hardware does NOT support headset profile". So save you some time, don't bother download wincomm etc.

One good thing about Mac is it comes with generic drivers for many devices. Nowadays, most brand-named products are actually OEM of some very generic stuff and you know Microsoft is not a chip maker, so. . .

Yeah, sure enough, once you connect your MS Bluetooth 2.0 dongle for the mouse to Mac OS X Tiger (either intel or PowerPC) it is recognized and started. You can pair the mouse easily.

When you try to add device and choose headset, you will be told the hardware does not support this profile.

So, kudu to the Mac! You can use Microfot IntelliMouse for Bluetooth even though Microsoft says "support Windows ONLY". Yeah! Who trust Microsoft! Well holdon on that statement, Microsoft said the dongle does not support headset, and it is true, it does not!.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Compile WINE on Mac OS X Tiger

The WINE is more practical than ever on Mac OS after the Apple Inc. shifted to Intel platform.

There was Darwine (maybe I should say IS, but I haven't seen any update from Darwine for over half a year now). Darwine is meant for PowerPC Macs - because the lack of binary compatibility, Darwine needs a PC emulator to run Windows applications on PowerPC Macs. (It still better than running a virtual Windows - you don't need the Windows license to run WINE or Darwine.

Things are much less complex now, thanks to the moving to the Intel CPUs. At the core, a Mac is binary wise compatible with a PC running Windows. All you need to run (most) Windows applications on a Mac OS is WINE.

However, there are not many doc out there telling people how to build WINE on a Mac.
I guess it is TOO easy for the hard-core WINE "drinkers" and there is no need for a step by step doc for building it. However, a lot of Mac user are not as CMDLUI (Command line User Interface) as Linux users, and I figure it may be helpful if we have a (brief) doc helping users to build WINE on Mac OS X.


Let me try to make it easier for you here (Everything is done on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger).

1) you will need X11. Remember that WINE is written for Linux originally, and it use the de facto GUI standard - X11. While Mac OS X comes with X11 (Mac is based on Darwin - a variance of FreeBSD), it is not the default Apple GUI (which is AQUA). You can check if you have X11 by open the Finder, under Applications, Utilities, you an app called X11 sitting there. If you don't see it there, you need to install it by pop in the Mac OS X installation DVD, run the Optional Packages, and select X11 in it.

2)You will need Xcode with X11 SDK. These are the tools you use to compile and build WINE. It is freely available to Mac Users (it is GCC 3.3 and 4.0 at the core). One thing to note though, you need Xcode 2.4.1 or up. The Xcode came on the DVD will give you Syntax error ( unknow structure x86_DEBUG_STATE32) while compiling mach.c.

A good thing about Xcode is it is so easy to use, it nearly make you forget you are "developing" something. Don't be scared if you never wrote any program, it is really simpler than Microsoft Office.

3)You need Freetype 2.05 or up. You can either use a package (Macport/DarwinPort or fint), or you can download the source and build your own. I prefer download and build my own (probably because of my Linux background).

4)You will need Fontforge. Again you can chose to install a package or build it from source. Again, I prefer build from source.

5) You will need to change the PATH before you start ./configure of WINE, or it will not be able to find X11 and freetype. export PATH=/usr/X11/bin:$PATH.

6) now some basic things that Linux guys will laugh at me for writing about it. you now download wine, extract it to a directory, go into that dir and run "./configure"

7) make sure ./configure shows you no error, at the end it tells you now run "make depend && make". do so.

8) if everything returns clean, you should install wine to /usr/local/ by running make install.

9) now you can test your wine by running ./wine notepad.exe (you need to copy the notepad.exe from a real Windows machine).

10) optional but suggested: add "/usr/local/bin" to your PATH.

Upgrading to SAP ECC 6.0 with error in RSUVSAVE phase.

YOu may see error check log failure "PSUVSAVE\.SID".
The message inidicates the filename is not right (the "\" before the ".") make you think the upgrade assistant (SAPup actually) is looking for a file with "\" in its name.

That's misleading. It is just a Unix escape character that was not removed in the error message.

This actually because the DIR_PUT was not set right (check your DEFAULT.PFL) the upgrade always check for the log files in /usr/sap/put/log dir, but most of the case the default DIR_PUT is the transport dir.

Also, you NEED to bounce your SAP instance for this change. While the UA will go on right after you change the DEFAULT.PFL without recycle the instance, it will give you error like this one later.

So, check your profile as early as you can, and bounce your instance if you need to.