Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with windows and osx

Sharing Is Caring?

murtagh — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:54:25 -0800

Sharing a printer between an iMac (with printer driver installed) and a Windows laptop without installing any drivers on the laptop: can it be done? I have an iMac running OS X Leopard. My sister is using her work laptop. Unfortunately, her company has disallowed (blocked) installation of any new software on the laptop, which includes printer drivers. We need to share the printer between the iMac and the laptop. The iMac, to which the printer is connected, has the printer drivers installed.

Can the printer be shared between the iMac and the laptop without installing any drivers on the laptop?

The printer is a Canon Pixma MP145.

Please tell me this is possible (or any possible alternatives). Any help would be greatly appreciated!

My Dream Dual Boot Netbook

lemonfridge — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:39:01 -0800

Help me build my perfect netbook! I've had my iBook G4 since I started Uni over 6 years ago, but it's starting to show it's age and things are starting to play up (apart from the battery!)

So I've ordered myself a Samsung NC20 with a 2Gb of RAM upgrade. I'd really like to dual or triple boot between Windows, OSX, and....something.

1. It comes with XP, but I'm tempted to go for a Windows 7 upgrade. Thoughts?

I like OSX and wouldn't mind keeping it an option.

2. I'd like a flavour of Linux or possible the new Google OS. Thoughts?

3. I really like how quickly my current iBook waked up when I open the lid. Can I expect the same thing from my new NC20?

4. Where is the best guide to acheive what I want? I've never dual booted anything before.

Formatting Differences in MS Word on Windows vs Mac

spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:35:47 -0800

How consistent is MS Office between Windows and OSX? Will using MS Office on my Mac solve this formatting problem I'm having? I'm have a MacBook Pro running Leopard,and I've been using Open Office to write my papers. It's great. I love Open Office (and love that it's free). When I need to turn something in, I just save it in PDF format, e-mail it to myself, then go to a computer lab, check my e-mail, and print off the PDF document. Perfect.

The problem is that I have a professor who needs some documents turned in via e-mail, and they use MS Word. I can save an Open Office document as a Word file (.doc or .docx), and for plain text formatting that's fine, but as soon as an outline or numbered list is created, things look crazy. It seems fine when I save it in Open Office, and it's fine when I then open that document using Open Office, but if the document is opened with MS Word, the formatting is horrible.

I can buy the MS Office suite for Mac at school using my student discount (it's around $35 I think). If I install that, and use Word to create these documents, will they appear the same when my professor opens them using Word, on her Windows computer?

If there will still be differences then I'll skip the $35 and just keep going to the computer lab to tweak things.

If I save a document in MS Word on a Mac and send it to a person using MS Word on a PC, are there formatting differences?

I'm trying to win a bet

metacort — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:30:50 -0800

Is Windows 7 an upgraded version of Vista (like Snow Leopard presumably is of Leopard) or completely re-built from the bottom up?

CD manufacturer identification on the Mac?

ignignokt — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:18:38 -0800

Is there a Mac equivalent to CDR Media Code Identifier. This could be run in Parallels, but I'm not sure it'll be able to get what it needs out of the DVD drive. And of course, it'd be nice to not have to run Parallels.

How to centralize adminsitration of multiple Unix machines (and others)?

Imhotep is Invisible — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:45:34 -0800

I'm curious as to what are the current "best practices" when it comes to centralized administration of a network of Unix (primarily Linux, but not necessarily so) machines? Essentially, what is the equivalent of Active Directory for a network with one or more Unix hosts? The immediate answer I come up with would be something like OpenLDAP plus PAM but what I'm looking for is the suite of tools (GUI and CLI apps) for managing the directory, deploying software, centralizing sign-on and security, managing printers, etc. In a perfect world, I would like to centralize administration of Windows, Unix, and OS X machines via a single directory service, though I imagine such a solution would be expensive and/or cumbersome if it even existed. Or is this something Samba 4 will do?

A network between two adjacent buildings

eustacescrubb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:44:19 -0800

I need advice on the best and least expensive way to have a network between two adjacent buildings. I'm part of a writer's residency, and the organization owns two houses next door to each other. We want to have one network, with one internet connection, between the two houses. One house has the only desktop there will be, and at least one WiFi-capable laptop. The other house has nothing but WiFi-capable laptops. There is a mixture of people running Windows XP and Mac OSX (nothing older than Leopard).

Ideally, I would like to have a blazing fast internet connection, and one router, to which the desktop is connected, and then maybe have some kind of powerful antenna to boost the WiFi signal over to the other house. It would be awesome if I could also get printer sharing, Bonjour (or whatever they're calling it this week) for Windows and Mac set up, file sharing, etc -- basically the ideal would be to have an honest-to-god network set up. I can do all that once I know how to share the network between the two buildings. Our org doesn't have a lot of extra money so I would like to keep the cost as low as possible.

Creating a map image from a geotagged image?

jaimev — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:12:12 -0800

Is there a Windows or OS X utility that takes a geotagged JPEG image and generates an image of a map containing a pushpin or dot showing the location where the image was taken? Also, it would be nice to control the size of the output image and the map scale.

I'm planning on taking a sequence of still images, geotagging them, stitching them together to create a movie (like this), but adding an overlay of a map image on the lower right corner showing the current location.

That's where this utility would come in - to generate the map overlay images.

Choosing a filesystem for an external hdd

contraption — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:10:54 -0800

What filesystem should I use on my new USB 2.0 external hard drive? It'll mostly stay attached to an Ubuntu box and be used to store large video files for streaming to playback devices on my network, but I'd also like to be able to take it to a friend's house and plug it into whatever computer they happen to have. The files will be large and replaceable, so I'm not even going to attempt to keep backups. I'm guessing it should be a Microsoft filesystem, since afaik Windows isn't happy with anything else and every other major OS has some way of dealing with them. Should it be NTFS? Some version of FAT? What tool should I use to do the formatting? I also have Windows and OS X machines available for setup.

Cross-Platform Crashing on a Macbook Pro

N2O1138 — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:04:43 -0800

I have Leopard and Windows 7 (7057) installed on my Late 2007 (possibly older, I got it refurbished) Macbook Pro 15". My problem is, every time I boot into either OS, I get a kernel panic or BSOD respectively. The fact that it happens in 2 different operating systems makes me almost positive that it's a hardware problem. Unfortunately, I don't know very much about computer hardware, so I don't really know what to troubleshoot first, and I don't want to void the warranty by opening the case (I plan to take it to the Apple Store if nobody here can solve the problem). Specifically, either operating system will crash about a minute into booting up. I don't think the problem can be too serious because everything graphically looks fine and all my files are intact. This leads me to think that maybe it's a RAM problem, and that it runs out of memory and crashes during bootup. Safe Mode in Windows works fine (I'm using it now), and still reports the correct 2gb of RAM. I haven't done safe boot to OS X yet.

The Blue Screen says
"Uncorrectable Hardware Error" and below it gives the code
*** STOP: 0x00000124 (0x00000000,0x85BAE024,0xF2000000,0x00060151)

If it were just what I'm experiencing on Windows, I might think it was something to do with drivers, but it's on both operating systems.

New Mac Setup

Admiral Haddock — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:56:33 -0800

OK, so my new Mac will arrive next week. Can power users fill me in on best practices for setting it up? I've used Macs for a looooong time now, but I think I've really lost touch with how they should be set up. I am currently running off of a first-generation MacBook where everything is set up on a single admin user (without a password--ugh).

So, starting from scratch, I'd like to set this up with an admin user, a user for me, and a guest user with limited privileges (but full access to iTunes and innocuous stuff). I've read the great tutorial on from this post already, but I still have (possibly stupid) questions that I'd love your thoughts on.

1) I presume I'll use migration assistant to get everything I want from the MacBook over to the Mac Pro. Do I set up an administrator first and then add the MacBook account as a new user? Or set up administrator and a new user, and import to the new user account directly? I've never used different accounts before--do you install programs while logged in as the administrator and then set which users have access? Or install as the user (with the admin password)? If you install as a user, can the administrator then share with the other accounts?

2) What about security? This thread has a lot of advice I hope to follow. But a couple other questions: I expect my home directory for the user account will be about 300-500 GB. Is Filevault able to decrypt/encrypt large directories on the fly, or does it get choked up? Does it make more sense just to use encryption on certain subfolders, rather than the whole user directory? If so, what program? Should I be setting up an Open Firmware password? Or is this just overkill?

3) Would it make sense to keep all of my documents on a second drive in one of the extra bays, so that I can yank the personal stuff if I ever have to send in the machine?

4) What about installing Windows? I think I'm assuming I might install it with Bootcamp, but I have an old version of Parallels I might upgrade to the latest and greatest. Is it safer to install Windows on a dedicated drive? How does Windows (either in Boot Camp or in virtualization) play with multiple accounts/security settings?

I'd definitely like to set up the new machine right the first time. Thanks in advance for your input!

OSX can't see my XP drive

middleclasstool — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:50:15 -0800

Suddenly my Mac can't see my Windows PC, and I'm stumped. So I have a Windows PC (XP, latest service pack) and a new Macbook Pro (latest up-to-date version of Leopard). When I first got the Mac I was able to connect to my XP drive over wifi just fine by going to Finder and choosing "Connect to server" and typing in smb://bill (Bill's the XP PC's name, natch).

But suddenly it's not working anymore and I'm stumped. When I try to connect, using either that PC's name or IP address, it says it can't connect. When I ping that IP address, it sees it just fine.

The only thing I can think was awhile back I attempted directly connecting a Linux box to the Win PC to try to share its wifi connection. I did some tweaking of local network settings, but it never worked quite right, so I reverted changes. It could well be that something is still configured incorrectly on the Windows box, but damned if I can see what.

Any ideas?

Installing Windows 7 on a MBP with a non-working DVD drive

N2O1138 — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:22:32 -0800

How can I install Windows 7 (via Boot Camp or rEFIt) from an ISO? I think the Superdrive on my Macbook Pro (10.5.6) is on its last legs, because it ejects almost anything I put in it. (Meaning blank DVDs, and the DVD I burned of the ISO on my Windows XP desktop with ImgBurn). It's not extremely old (I got it refurbished on Christmas 2007), but still old enough to be out of warranty (at least I would think so). What I have available: 1tb My Book Firewire External Hard Drive 4gb 1st gen iPod Nano, that isn't even formatted as an iPod right now, so it's basically just a 4gb USB flash drive. I know I can boot from it if it's set up right, because I've been using it with this What I've tried so far:
I can't restore the iPod to the ISO in Disk Utility, so I tried to convert the ISO to a DMG (in Disk Utility and using a program called Converso), getting errors both times.

I tried mounting the ISO, erasing everything on the iPod, and copying everything straight out of the ISO to the iPod, but it doesn't appear as anything bootable.

Please help if you can

Bootcamp flummoxes wireless connection.

It ain't over yet — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:21:16 -0800

I've got two Macbook Pros and a wireless router. Everything works great, except when I restart one of the MBPs in Bootcamp (XP, Service Pack 3), suddenly the wireless connection on both MBPs gets spotty -- off and on, off and on -- although a hard ethernet connection from the Bootcamped MBP works fine. Flummoxing. Any ideas?

Anyway to develop iPhone/iTouch apps without investing in a Mac?

nmaster64 — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:16:25 -0800

I'm interested in developing iPhone/iPod Touch applications, however my understanding is the SDK only works in OSX. I have a XP desktop and a Vista notebook with an AMD Athlon and Turion (both dual core) respectively, both pretty good machines. Is there any way to avoid spending serious cash buying a Mac just to get into iPhone development?

Alternative to Papers

Aanidaani — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:16:27 -0800

I recently found a fantastic program for managing research literature on OSX and I'm looking for a similar program for Windows and Linux. The program for OSX is called Papers and is just beautiful. I really love the interface and it connects to all kinds of databases to make importing papers very easy. Is there anything like this for Windows or Linux?

How can I tile windows in OS X

creeront — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:42:11 -0800

How can I easily tile my windows in OS X like I do in MS Windows? I want to easily and quickly tile my windows in OS X (especially word documents so I can read them side by side) like I do in MS Windows. In Windows, I use Winsplit Revolution and right clicking on the taskbar and hitting 'tile vertically'. Is there any way to do this?

Picture a Venn diagram with 3 circles: LaTeX, Emacs, Mac. I'd like to live in the intersection.

gleuschk — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:08:47 -0800

Mac users who write LaTeX documents in Emacs (with or without AucTeX), please tell me about your workflow. My wife and I both recently switched (back) to Macs from Windows machines. We're mathematicians, and we both live -- or used to live -- pretty much completely inside an Emacs buffer, writing LaTeX. We've had a terrible time approximating our Windows setups on the new Macs. What Emacs version do you people use? (I've tried Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs.) What PDF previewer? (Skim, Preview, something else?) Most importantly: how is everything tied together, in your .emacs or elsewhere?

Finally, please help me understand what the point of AucTeX is. Both the emacs versions I've tried come with it pre-installed. So far, all I can see is that it adds unnecesary keystrokes when I want to typeset something, and destroys all my useful muscle-memory. Do you use it? Does it make your life better/easier?

Gotta Be a Way

thedoctorpants — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:38:37 -0800

I want to easily port my cocoa app (osx) to windows. What are my options? Do I have any?

How can I share a mounted NTFS volume over AFP?

DLWM — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:01:14 -0800

Networkfilter: I have a NTFS volume mounted on my OS X Server box. I'd like to access it over the net using AFP. It's not showing up as an available AFP share. What gives? The NTFS volume mounts fine on the server:



admin@os-x-server$ sudo mount_smbfs //user@windows-fileserver/SHARE ~/ntfsdir

Password: os-x-server-password

Password: windows-password

admin@os-x-server$ ls -l ~ | grep ntfsdir

drwxr-xr-x    1 admin  staff  16384 Dec 31  1969 ntfsdir

admin@os-x-server$ ls -l ~/ntfsdir

drwxr-xr-x   1 admin  staff    16384 Feb 23 05:27 dir1

drwxr-xr-x   1 admin  staff    16384 Jun  3 09:42 dir2

drwxr-xr-x   1 admin  staff    16384 Apr 15 16:24 dir3

.

.

.

So it's mounting fine and the permissions look okay. In the Workgroup Manager for the OS X Server, ~/ntfsdir is set as a share point, owner is given read and write access, and AFP is enabled for that share. But when I try to mount the AFP share on my local machine, I get the following error:



user@os-x-client$ sudo mount_afp afp://admin:password@os-x-server/ntfsdir ~/afpdir

Password: os-x-client-password

mount_afp: the mount flags are 0000 the altflags are 0020

mount_afp: AFPMountURL returned error -5019, errno is 2

user@os-x-client$

Google says that error -5019 means bad share name. And indeed, when I use Connect to Server... from the the Finder on the client machine, the share ntfsdir doesn't show up, even though it's enabled in the Workgroup Manager, AFP access is on, and owner has full read/write permissions to the share (both in AFP share config and in the server's filesystem itself).

Even weirder, the I can't even mount the share over AFP from within the server itself! I get the following error:



admin@os-x-server$ sudo mount_afp afp://admin:password@localhost/ntfsdir ~/testdir

Password: os-x-server-password

mount_afp: the mount flags are 0000 the altflags are 0020

mount_afp: AFPMountURL returned error -5019, errno is 32

admin@os-x-server$

So for some reason this share is not being advertised properly. I've tried making other test AFP shares, and they work fine... it must have something to do that I'm trying to share a directory that is itself a mount point for a mounted NTFS share.

I don't see why the AFP service even knows that ~admin/ntfsdir (on the server) is an NTFS mounted share... seems like it should just be another directory in the filesystem, from its perspective. Unless it's a permissions thing that I'm missing, although, like I said, the permissions for ~admin/ntfsdir look good; I can browse the mounted NTFS volume on the server through the command line, etc.

Any clever suggestions for me?

Windows won't serve to Mac

airplain — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:45:41 -0800

Problem: OSX to Windows direct-wired ethernet connection works, but the Mac can't see the shared PC drives. The PC and the Mac are both normally on wifi but the Mac's Airport is turned off now. Both machines have manual addresses set on their ethernet NICs, with direct CAT5 cable between the two; PC = 10.0.0.1/255.255.255.0; Mac=10.0.0.2/255.255.255.0. (The cable isn't a crossover, because OSX now manages that.) Ping works in both directions (i.e. from either machine to the other.) I want to connect from the Mac to the PC's share D, so I do flower-K to connect to smb://10.0.0.1/D.

First time I tried the Mac's dialog showed "Connecting" then radio buttons for 'guest' or "name + password". Because the PC's guest account was off I tried the PC's name+pw but OSX rejected it (and other names+pws) and said "not allowed..." [NOT the exact words, and I can no longer get this dialog].

I enabled the PC's guest a/c and tried the guest radiobutton on the Mac's Connect to Server. No success. Now the Mac doesn't ask for name and pw at all, and there's no guest/ID+PW choice nor radiobutton. Every time I try to connect from Mac to smb://10.0.0.1/D (or other share on the PC) the response after trying to connect is "Connection Failed. You do not have permission to access this server."

Windows Local Security Settings policies are not assigned. Do I need to change any other security settings?

As mentioned Airport is disabled on the Mac, but it's active on the PC. Another Mac here can share the PC just fine over wireless; no problem logging in - pretty much any username+pw works, it's not picky.

I need a fast connection though, to get stuff onto the new goodness of Mac (fresh yesterday. Yum.)

Hw/software: Macbook 13"; 2.1 GHz core duo; 1GB; internal NIC; running MacOS X .5.2. Windows XP Pro sp2 on homebuilt PC (ASUS mobo, Athlon 1500+ @ 1.3 GHz) 512 MB; Intel PRO/100 NIC. (Both OSes have current updates.)

Installing Vista from Upgrade in Bootcamp

Aanidaani — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:39:08 -0800

Has anyone tried installing Windows Vista in BootCamp (On a Mac) using an upgrade disk? I've installed Vista perfectly using this guide on a computer I built myself, but I want to do it on a new Mac. I'd like to install Vista on a Mac using BootCamp, but I don't have a full copy of the OS. I do have a legal upgrade disk, which I've used to install the full OS as described in the link above. I'd just like to know if the same thing is possible on a Mac, or if there is a guide to doing this. Thanks!

Dashboard = OSX, ? = XP

fox_terrier_guy — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:33:44 -0800

Determine the result please; Dashboard = Mac OSX, ? = Windows XP I REALLY like the OSX dashboard on my laptop, especially when hitting the F12 key it supercedes the present program, and gives me up to date info that I have installed.

But, what is the XP equivalent of Dashboard? Is there one, or am I pining for the fjords of Norway? I know that Firefox has add-ins for various functions, but I like the suspension of the existing operation and getting the info straight away. (If you use OSX, you will know what I mean). It would be nice to have the same functionality at work on my XP box.

Bonus marks for freeware/OSS.

Thanks to all who take the time to respond.

How well does Vista run on Macbooks?

adi — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 10:00:18 -0800

How well does Vista run on a Macbook Pro (or Regular Macbook)? How do the windows functions (like right-click, etc.) work? Are there things that won't work or will be different that may annoy me while running Vista on Apple hardware? Also, can I default it to boot into Vista and NOT in OS X? I'm talking about bootcamp and not parallels or fusion. I am looking to get a new laptop and was thinking of getting a Macbook Pro just to have the option of working in OS X from time to time, but I want to know how well it really runs Vista and how to do things like right-click (the lack of the button on a macbook is almost a deal breaker for me).

And please don't tell me that if I switched to OS X I'd just prefer it and never go back -- that's not what I'm asking.