Richard Kettlewell

This image raises two issues:

1. Why does the Mac disk get an anti-aliased font and the Windows one a pixelated one?
2. Just how many fonts does a boot loader actually need?

I've enabled Time Machine. It took a few hours to back up 70GB or so to an external disk. It didn't back up the Windows XP partition; I'm not sure I approve but considering that as a separate machine and therefore organizing backups of some form separately is not something that actually bothers me that much.

Not much more to say about it at this point; it's rather in the nature of backups that you don't just enable them and know all you need to know...

Further to my remarks on Leopard one of the reasons for buying it was to add a Windows partition to my Mac via Boot Camp.

Boot Camp comprises a partitioning tool, support for dual boot and a collection of drivers (on the Leopard install disk) for running Windows on Apple hardware. You need an Intel Mac and a sufficiently recent copy of XP or Vista. In this version only 32-bit software is supported even though I have a 64-bit CPU, but I hear that more recent Macs are shipping with 64-bit capable Boot Camp. 64-bit operation isn't particularly important for what I current want out of Windows anyway (games and the odd bit of software development).

Partitioning was perfectly easy. On booting into the Windows XP installer the keyboard didn't work initially; after I unplugged my USB card reader and rebooted it was OK, however. I'm not sure if this is Apple's bug or Microsoft's but it seems to be a common problem.

The network setup decided to apply the address I gave it to the firewire port rather than either of the ethernet ports. I disabled the firewire port (under windows) and the non-connected ethernet and it was happier. (As with my Windows/Linux dual-boot system) I'd given the Windows partition a different name and address to the MacOS partition.

SHIFT 3 on my UK keyboard produces £, which is not what I wanted; I type # much more often than £. Under Mac OS I was able to select a US keyboard layout but Windows doesn't offer me a US Apple layout (and the US layouts it does have have other keys in the wrong places).

Here's what I did to get around this:

1. Install the keyboard layout creator from http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx and run it
2. Load the Apple UK layout
3. Change £ to # and vica versa, using CTRL+ALT+3 to type #
4. Select Project->Properties and edit the name etc
5. Select Project->Test Keyboard Layout to make sure it works
6. Save the source file
7. Selected Project->Build DLL and Setup Package
8. Quit the layout creator
9. Install the new layout package
10. Go to Control Panel->Regional And Language Options->Languages and make the new keyboard layout the default

Rather surpringly the choice of keyboard layout doesn't seem to be reachable via Control Panel->Keyboard.

I installed the following things without any difficulty:

• PuTTY
• Firefox
• Windows updates (needed 2 restarts)
• IE7
• Starcraft and Brood War
• Rome: Total War
• Warcraft III
• Visual C++ 2008
• RealVNC
• DirectX SDK (March 2008)

Half Life said it didn't like my OS (it predates XP by some years) and needed a patch, but after rather fruitlessly poking around the web for the right thing (which used to be on Sierra's website but isn't any more) I installed Opposing Force and it installed a patch and ran OK anyway.

--- server/play.c       2008-03-03 22:56:22 +0000
+++ server/play.c       2008-03-09 11:10:46 +0000
@@ -389,8 +390,14 @@
       /* np will be the pipe to disorder-normalize */
       if(socketpair(PF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, 0, np) < 0)
         fatal(errno, "error calling socketpair");
+      /* Beware of the Leopard!  On OS X 10.5.x, the order of the shutdown
+       * calls here DOES MATTER.  If you do the SHUT_WR first then the SHUT_RD
+       * fails iwth "Socket is not connected".  I think this is a bug but
+       * provided implementors either don't care about the order or all agree
+       * about the order, choosing the reliable order is an adequate
+       * workaround.  */
+      xshutdown(np[1], SHUT_RD);       /* decoder writes to np[1] */
       xshutdown(np[0], SHUT_WR);       /* normalize reads from np[0] */
-      xshutdown(np[1], SHUT_RD);       /* decoder writes to np[1] */
       blocking(np[0]);
       blocking(np[1]);
       /* Start disorder-normalize */