Winmodems are from Venus, Macs are from Mars
Sunday, 3. August 2008, 05:52:17
Posting from a dialup connection today, which has a certain retro charm to it. Getting online wasn't as easy as I'd hoped though, read on for the full story.
First off, since I'm packing a macbook and the modem I have to use is a winmodem, a Conexant v90 modem to be exact, there of course weren't any mac drivers for it. So I decided to try using the Parallels VM to get online in Windows XP. No luck though, the modem was detected but it didn't work correctly. This prompted some googling and I thought that maybe I could install and run Windows on the macbook without emulation/virtualization. This turned out to be a major hassle since I didn't want to use the internal harddrive for this installation, but an external usb/firewire drive. A few unsuccessful attempts later, I gave up on that, and tried installing linux on the external drive instead.
Now I learned that Apple recently expired the BootCamp support for OS X Tiger (10.4), as a way of getting people to pay up for Leopard (10.5) I guess, so I had to find some other solution. Turns out there's a free mac boot menu toolkit called rEFIt, which worked just fine. rEFIt can see my external linux install, but alas is still unable to boot from it. Even when I put the linux
Then I remembered that I installed VirtualBox on a few machines recently, but I hadn't yet tried it on my macbook. So I did, and lo and behold the modem just started working!
VirtualBox is free and Open Source virtual machine that can run many different OSes, and it can be installed on OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris (and I've now tried all except Solaris). Though it should be noted that not all parts of VirtualBox have been released as Open Source.
Probably only a matter of time before I install linux on the internal harddrive anyway, just need to sort out what to throw away first. Though it still sucks that I can't boot linux off the external firewire drive, which is something that obviously works fine for OS X installs.
In conclusion, thanks to Sun for releasing VirtualBox.
First off, since I'm packing a macbook and the modem I have to use is a winmodem, a Conexant v90 modem to be exact, there of course weren't any mac drivers for it. So I decided to try using the Parallels VM to get online in Windows XP. No luck though, the modem was detected but it didn't work correctly. This prompted some googling and I thought that maybe I could install and run Windows on the macbook without emulation/virtualization. This turned out to be a major hassle since I didn't want to use the internal harddrive for this installation, but an external usb/firewire drive. A few unsuccessful attempts later, I gave up on that, and tried installing linux on the external drive instead.
Now I learned that Apple recently expired the BootCamp support for OS X Tiger (10.4), as a way of getting people to pay up for Leopard (10.5) I guess, so I had to find some other solution. Turns out there's a free mac boot menu toolkit called rEFIt, which worked just fine. rEFIt can see my external linux install, but alas is still unable to boot from it. Even when I put the linux
/boot directory on a partition on the internal drive it didn't want to boot.Then I remembered that I installed VirtualBox on a few machines recently, but I hadn't yet tried it on my macbook. So I did, and lo and behold the modem just started working!
VirtualBox is free and Open Source virtual machine that can run many different OSes, and it can be installed on OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris (and I've now tried all except Solaris). Though it should be noted that not all parts of VirtualBox have been released as Open Source.
Probably only a matter of time before I install linux on the internal harddrive anyway, just need to sort out what to throw away first. Though it still sucks that I can't boot linux off the external firewire drive, which is something that obviously works fine for OS X installs.
In conclusion, thanks to Sun for releasing VirtualBox.
WIDGETIZE