Tag Archives: operating systems

Tablet PC Restoration – Part 1

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This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash.

Background

My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon while working in Windows. You got the standard click of the drive arm against the platter that wouldn’t stop.

I tried some basic restoration techniques to see if I could at least see the drive:

Nothing worked. So I went out and bought a new hard drive for her from one of the local computer places in Valdosta, Belson’s pcXchange.

Installation Problems

At this point I thought I was going to be homefree, boy was I wrong. The first hurdle was getting the Windows install cd to even see the hard drive. Apparently the bios for the CX210X does not have a legacy option to allow the SATA controller to be seen as a standard IDE controller. No problem, I can just use a USB floppy drive to load the drivers before the install, right? Wrong.

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Getting Xnest for Leopard

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In the application selection process for 10.5, the X11 maintainers elected not to include Xnest.

While most users will probably not need this, since you can export X11 application through a SSH connection, sometimes it is quite handy to have the entire gui session available from a remote server.

I use this when managing some of my Solaris servers. With X11 on 10.4 this was readily available, but after installing 10.5 I found that it had not been included. Initially I just copied the binary from my 10.4 install into the expected location and tried to use it. However, as I expected, the results were not particularly satisfactory, given that the binary was built against a different X11 source tree.

After posting some of my compile issues to the X11-Users mailing list (archives are here), the code maintainer released a patch to the xorg code that fixed the symbol issues that had reared their ugly heads.
For those who are interested in making it work here’s what you need to do:

  1. Follow the first seven lines under the section Source installation on the XDarwin wiki page
  2. Change the configure instruction line to be as follows:
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/X11 --enable-xnest=yes --with-mesa-source=`pwd`/../Mesa-6.5.2
  3. Continue with the rest of the source instructions as posted in the wiki page
  4. After copying the new Xquartz binary over, copy the Xnest binary as well:
    sudo cp hw/xnest/Xnest /usr/X11/bin/
  5. Don’t forget the manpage:
    sudo cp hw/xnest/Xnest.1 /usr/share/man/man1/

Now you have a nicely patched install of the latest fixes for Xquartz as well as the Xnest binary.

If only compiling Xpehyr was working now…sigh.

Resources:

Mac OS X 10.5: Security Hint 1 – Guest Account

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Now that Mac OS X has almost been out for a week, there are a lot of articles coming out concerning the security features and their effectiveness, or lack thereof:

Some people are pointing out some flaws with the way that the Guest account works and what is left behind after it is used then disabled.

The simple solution is to set the login shell to be /dev/null instead of using bash like the default.