Bad Apples

7/21/2008

I have a love-hate relationship with Apple. It is not just that they do both good and bad things, its that they seem to do extremes. They make some exceptionally well designed pieces of hardware, but then they turn around and take some small item and so completely screw it up that you want to....

My relationship with Apple started with my defective and poorly designed first generation IPOD. That turned me completely off of IPOD and several MP3 players later I'm extremely happy with my current Creative Zen. I did not blacklist Apple however and later bought a Mac Mini to use as a small low power Windows server, and also bought several Apple keyboards (A tale of two keyboards).

Windows XP

My Mac Mini has been running flawlessly for over 2 years now. XP SP3 is out now though and I could not install it. SP3 installed just fine on my dozens of virtual machines, my desktops, and my laptops. I blamed Microsoft, but since all the individual Windows updates continued to install I just wrote it off for a problem to solve later. Later in this blog we'll see that it is Apple's fault.

Windows 2008

I have been using XP on it as a miniature server to assist my development work. XP actually does pretty well but I have been playing with Windows 2008 Server and have been really impressed. Occasionally I overwhelm the TCP stack in XP and would like to now do some development against certain features in 2008, such as IIS 7. So I decided to try to install Windows 2008 server on the Mac Mini.

Apple, Snapple, Crapple

If Snapple is "made of the best things on earth", then I think Apple Computer should separate into Hardware and Software companies and name their new software division Crapple. Looking back at my previous Apple experiences, its always the updates or software bugs that have caused my problems. This might be another time to consider my post The Windows Macintosh. If Apple would focus on hardware or at least make hardware that came with Mac OSX and/or Windows they would sell a lot more and do a real service to Windows users by bringing usable hardware design to the market.

Bootable CD's don't Boot

So lets start out with my story. I simply wanted to install Windows 2008 on my Mac Mini. First I tried to boot a standard CD ROM containing Boot It Next Generation (aka BING). No luck. I then tried other bootable CD's including Windows XP, and Windows 2008.

Let's not Confuse the User

Most other PC's in the world if they find a bootable disk either boot it, or tell you there is a bootable disk and press a key to boot it. Apple seems to think users are incapable of dealing with such confusion, so there are no boot up messages at all.  Just a gray screen and then whatever the booting OS decides to say. Searching around I found that you have to hold down the c key while booting to tell the Mac Mini to boot off CD. And it has to be a lower case c, so make sure caps lock is off.

Apple Keyboards and Apple Computers

But it does not work for me. I tried, and retried. No luck. Since it kept booting into Windows and I got sick of waiting each time for it to boot and then shut it down I started resorting to just powering off and back on. This of course causes Windows to display a menu allowing you to choose some boot options. I noticed that my keyboard did not work during this stage, although it works fine after I boot into Windows or Mac OSX. The Mac Mini has no PS/2 ports, but only USB. I have an Apple USB keyboard and that is what I use on Windows. You would think that an Apple keyboard would be recognized by an Apple computer? I have not found the solution to this yet, but some forum posts suggest that since my Apple keyboard is much newer than my Mac Mini, I need a firmware update and that other users that had this problem solved it by using a non Apple USB keyboard. Unfortunately I do not have any non Apple keyboards here as I have standardized on them.

Great OSX 10.4.11 Feature: Auto Bricking

While booted into Mac OSX it told me there were updates available. I never boot into OSX except to test Silverlight because Apple takes active measures to prevent virtualization of OSX. I booted into OSX to try to see what I could do from there. OSX told me there were updates to download and install. I figured "Why not?" and started the download. Fortunately I ran across some articles on the web while waiting for downloads. Updating to 10.4.11 for some users disables booting into Windows. This is a known issue and Apple's recommended solution is to delete Windows and reinstall it. Ok, technically it didn't brick the computer, but this is still quite severe. If I ran Windows Update and it killed my Linux boot and the only solution would be to reinstall Linux, Linux users would be screaming conspiracy.

Boot Camp Expired

Evidently Boot Camp (the software required to run Windows) was beta that I installed. I vaguely remember that. But I installed it in early 2006 and never touched it. Now when I run it from OSX, it tells me that it is expired. So I went looking for an update. Apple left it in beta stage for 18 months, even through many releases. Betas worked fine on OSX 10.4 and users were free to use it for 18 months. But then not only has it expired and refuses to run (although you can hack it by setting back your system clock), when they finally released it they removed all beta downloads and made it available only for OSX 10.5. Boot Camp beta 1.0 was released April 2006, and all betas expired Dec 31, 2007.

So just upgrade to OSX 10.5 right? 10.4 to 10.5 is not a free upgrade. It costs $129. So now Apple wants me to spend $129 to upgrade an OS I don't use, so I can install XP SP3 and install Windows on my Mac.

Boot Camp on Windows

Boot Camp also means something different now. Apple has released newer Windows drivers for the Mac Mini. However when I try to install them they refuse to install saying that I don't have a previous version of Boot Camp installed on Windows, even though it appears clearly in my add/remove programs list.

And in the notes for the newer drivers is a gem - Windows XP SP3 will not install without these updated drivers.

Open Source to the Rescue

Fortunately other users have hacked their way out of boot camp as well. Users are using EFI utilities to multi boot more than just two operating systems.

Unfortunately I cannot use this solution yet until I buy a non Apple keyboard so I can boot off of CD.

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