Howto: iPhone SIP iSipSimple and Sipgate

If you have an iPhone and also a sipgate.com account you might want to connect them.

Fro the App Store I installed iSipSimple, which is free.

Then, go to www.sipgate.com/faq click in the drop down list on the right and select SipPhone on iPhone. The pops-up a window with all your config information. You MUST note that your username and password are NOT those you use with the Sipgate web interface, or the Sipgate desktop application!

then click advanced


then settings and make them like this

It should all work!

OSX on Jetway Atom GM1

After recent efforts with OSX on non-regular hardware (Lenovo running 10.5.8, Wind U100 running 10.6.2),

I was looking to use a case that was hanging around that I got from Ebay for about £5.

After some looking bough a Jetway Atom GM1 on Ebay: it was a dual core

• it had 2 RAM slots
• the spec says supports 4Gb of RAM
• its a good form factor for my case

Here's the board in the case.

There are some issues:

• the positioning of the power socket is very poor, and means you have to press down on the wires to get them under the drive caddies
• the caddies also push to the RAM sockets, which means if you want to fill both sockets one of the RAM chips will have to be low profile. For some reason DDR2 RAM in low profile form factor is rare on Ebay.
  
• Curious.all the power connectors are molex, but the drive connectors are 2 x SATA and 1 x PATA, so if you want to use SATA HD you'll need SATA to Molex adaptor. This will cause the HD to butt right up against the PSU.

Anyway, not enough to put me off! Spec below from www.jetwaycomputer.com/Atom-GM.html

Processor	Atom 330 1.6GHz
Chipset	945GC + ICH7
Memory	2 x DDR2 400/533 Dual Channel DIMM slot (up to 2 GB)
Graphics	Intel GMA950 Integrated Graphics
Audio	Realtek ALC662 5.1 Channel Audio
LAN	Realtek RTL8102EL 10/100Mbit Ethernet

So with the spec, and knowing that if I wanted to close the case I'd need different RAM (I'd borrowed the 2 x 2Gb DDR2 sticks), it seemed a reasonable challenge to get OSX 10.5 Leopard running on it.

I chose iAtkos v7 which installs 10.5.7. I chose the default options, including the Realtek LAN and Realtek Audio. On reboot I got a bad crash:

"Should have 2 cores, but only 1 found for die0"

I thought initially it was due to the wrong kernel I chosen during install, so I booted from the DVD and installed just the Voodoo Kernel. Reboot, same thing.

Some Googling suggested that this was due to the Kernel not liking the four (2 physical, 2 logical) cores, so I went into the BIOS "Advanced Bios Features" and turned off hyper-threading. You could also use the boot option "CPUs=2".

Success!

Boots into 10.5.7 no problem, and feels quite nippy.

Quick check of whats working, and whats not... well it all working apart from audio in, which I can live with.

I had two problems though.

First, doing 'about this mac' caused a GUI crash, restarting the Finder and killing any open applications.

Second the CPU information shown in the System Profller was wrong.

At first I thought the two were related, so I found CPUInjector.kext and using instructions here I made the kext say the board had a Core Duo CPU

But this didn't fix the about 'this mac crash' , so a bit more Googling and I found another kext AppleSMBIOSEFI.kext.

Remove the old AppleSMBIOS kext, and then use kext helper to install AppleSMBIOSEFI.kext.

Then restart.

The boot is slower, but now 'about this mac' doesn't crash! Instead it shows garbage, but I can fix that!

Using OSX86Tools I selected "autoset CPU info" and "Restore System Strings Files to Defaults".



Log out and back in, and About This Mac is now fine.

OSX SnowLeopard: "The PPD is not compatible with Gutenprint 5.2.3"

I upgraded my MacBookPro to SnowLeopard, and one of the things not working was printing to my very venerable HP6L. I kept getting a "The PPD version (1137728) is not compatible with Gutenprint 5.2.3." message even though I was selecting GutenPrint 5.2.4.

I could print via a share to the same printer from another Mac running 10.5.8 Leopard, so I figured it was a GutenPrint issue.

Went to their page gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php (yes I know the link says gimp print) and on there they have an uninstaller to rid your machine of all version of GutenPrint. Then download and install the new GutenPrint 5.2.4 and I was good to go.

Error message in OSX Console - Can't create kext cache under / - owner not root

I was getting an error in the console:

com.apple.kextd[10]: Can't create kext cache under / - owner not root

This can be fixed by doing the following command:

sudo chown root:admin /

Finding older version of Parallels

If you've bought a copy of Parallels, and you need to re-download it, its hard to find the download link because when they release a new version, the download link changes to the new version. Well after some looking I found it kb.parallels.com/en/5802

Problems Installing Snow Leopard 10.6.2 on MSI Wind / Advent 4211

My previous effort at installing Snow Leopard 10.6.2 on MSI Wind / Advent 4211was a bad failure :(, fortunately someone is way better at these things than me.

As already explained I had previously bought a copy (off Apple as it happens) of Snow Leopard, and then I found this forum post.

First I installed on 8Gb SD card, and works well if slowly... also not much space free!

Then I had a go with the internal HD, but KP everytime. Hmmmmm.

Got another HD in an external SATA to USB case. The install failed, but thats the drive that had my failed effort. I re-formatted... same problem.

This HD was formatted GUID / GPT, so I used Disk utility to change the format type to MBR. I had to do this before, so I write about it here.

This time, all was good, and the HD in the SATA to USB case works great.

So now to see if I can make this work for the internal HD.

Yep, changed the format from MBR to GUID/GPT and seems to work OK.

Expanding a Parallels Hard Drive

If you are using Parallels and you installed a guest operating system in a partition that had turned out to be too small, you can make the virtual hard drive larger.

In applications>parallels there is "Parallels Image Tool". Double click to start it, and then select the virtual HD you want to make bigger

Click continue, and select the option to "increase the disk capacity"

Then select the new size, and click 'start'.

It can take a while. On my core 2 duo mac mini going from 8Gb to 12Gb took about an hour.