Nilesh D Kapadia

In VMWare Fusion, when using NAT, you often times want the IP addresses for the VMs to always be the same, so that you can connect to them from the host using the same IP address every time (and probably assign an entry in your /etc/hosts file). You may also want to connect to the host from the guests using a constant IP address. And finally, with VMs that use NAT, you may want to setup port forwarding so that machines outside of the host can connect to services on your VM (and this relies on the IP addresses remaining the same).

The configuration files for doing this reside in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/ (the NAT interface is called "vmnet8" hence why configuration for it is here), specifically dhcpd.conf and nat.conf. These files may be read-only (even for root), so make sure to give root write permission before you edit them.

Any changes to these files requires that the following be executed before they take effect:

sudo "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh" --restart

Pretty nice list of hidden settings for Mac OS X:

http://secrets.blacktree.com/

Mac OS X already has defined some basic Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-N/P/B/F/K/Y/T/etc) which are available in Cocoa text widgets. But Cocoa is highly configurable, and allows for configuring a larger subset of Emacs-style keybindings (among many other possibilities).

These two references written by Jacob Rus are very useful for understanding what you can do with the Cocoa text system:

Customizing the Cocoa Text System
Customize the Cocoa text binding system

If you want to see my Emacs-style keybindings you can get it here. I did not enable incremental search yet as I couldn't get the input manager for it working yet.

Now this only gives you these keybindings when you're editing text in a Cocoa application. Non-Cocoa applications will not be affected. Firefox is not affected even though it uses Cocoa. It does appear to affect Java Swing apps, though, such as IntelliJ IDEA and Oracle SQL Developer, which both have Emacs keybindings that don't work properly until you make these changes (combinations such as Option-v output a special character otherwise, rather than performing M-v).

In a future entry I will talk about how to use Butler and Firemacs to give Firefox more Emacs-style text editing and keyboard shortcuts. Butler's ability to simulate keystrokes (and trigger on keyboard combinations) is pretty powerful.

Update: VMWare Fusion 2.0.5 now supports Ubuntu 9.04. I recommend upgrading to 2.0.5 and installing the latest VMWare tools in your Ubuntu 9.04 guest, rather than following these instructions.
Update 2: Since upgrading to 2.0.5, I have been experiencing problems. Shutting down my Linux VM often causes VMWare Fusion to crash and once locked up my entire system, forcing me to hard boot and my Linux VM was corrupted in the process. I am reverting back to 2.0.4 for now, and have restored my Linux VM from a backup that I made before I upgraded to 2.0.5 which uses the VMWare Tools as modified in these instructions.

For an Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) guest, VMWare Tools does not work perfectly in VMWare Fusion 2.0.4 out-of-box (I had problems with mouse ungrab and window resizing, and the file sharing module doesn't even compile), but there is a way to get things working better. Someone at VMWare posted this blog which helped me get things working (along with the article and forum posting it linked to).

Here's what I did:

At work, we just recently received the new unibody 17" MacBook Pro. I got mine with the anti-glare option. I own a Early-2008 15" MacBook Pro (which I am very happy with) which is what I am comparing it to. I've only had it for about a day, and haven't used it that much yet, so these are just my initial impression and observations.

I like the display

I'm not necessarily a great judge of displays, but I'm pretty impressed with the display. Having 1920x1200 resolution on a notebook is just amazing. I subjectively find the display to look a little better than my 15". Do note that on a 17" display, with 1920x1200 you end up with very small text (with the default font sizes) and that could take some getting used. Adjusting font sizes will help, but would not be ideal if you are connecting an external display and trying to use both screens.

I will be comparing the display side-by-side with glossy displays on my co-workers' machines.

Less flex, more solid

Since my laptop before it was a Thinkpad T23, I found the Early-2008 15" MBP to be rather flimsy. There is a lot of flex to it. The new unibody MBP has lot less flex and is just more solid in general. The only place where it has a little flex is behind the display.

Keyboard doesn't seem too bad

I upgraded a Ubuntu VM that I use in VMWare Fusion from 8.04 to 8.10 ("Intrepid Ibex") and was having mouse issues. On a single-click the mouse would act like it was initiating a drag-lock. I could work around it by using the keyboard or rapidly clicking the mouse until it sent a single-click. The solution was to configure the vmmouse driver in xorg.conf.

My xorg.conf mouse configuration originally looked like this:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ImPS/2"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
EndSection

I changed the driver to vmmouse:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "vmmouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ImPS/2"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
EndSection

If you use Fink on more than one Mac that are the same platform (i.e. all Intel) and you install the same packages, it's very useful to setup a Binary Distribution Server. If you do, you only have to build packages on one system, and then the others will download packages that are already built.

The documentation on how to setup a Binary Distribution Server is correct except for the Apache configuration that it describes, at least with the version of Apache2 that is included with Leopard. If you follow those instructions on Leopard, when you try to access the URL for Fink (which will be http://yourserver/fink) you will get the following 403 Forbidden error:

Forbidden
 
You don't have permission to access /fink on this server.

To fix this you need to include an "Allow from all" in the Apache configuration, like this:

Alias /fink /sw/fink
<Directory /sw/fink>
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
  Allow from all
</Directory>

Note that this does allow anyone who has access to port 80 to read all the files in /sw/fink, which contains Fink package descriptions and binaries for all the packages you have built (but that shouldn't compromise your security because it doesn't include anything like configuration files).

There are a couple of different options for Emacs on OS X. OS X comes with the text-mode version of Emacs (22.1.1 in Leopard). If you use the text-mode version frequently through Terminal.app, be sure to enable Terminal.app's "Use option as meta key." However, if you spend a lot of time in Emacs you'll probably want to use one of the GUI versions. There are a couple of options:

Aquamacs - An "Aqua-native" fork of Emacs that makes it work more like a Mac application. For example, it supports many of the typical Mac keyboard shortcuts and has tabs. From my brief usage of this, it looked very nice, but since I also use Linux and Windows (as well as text-mode Emacs on the Mac), I want my Emacs experience to be fairly consistent across all platforms.

Carbon Emacs - A Carbon port of Emacs (currently version 22). This is what I would have used if I couldn't get the Cocoa build to work.

GTK Emacs - This is available from Fink (currently version 22), but like all GTK apps built through Fink, uses X11. Using X11 apps on OS X is rather inconvenient, so I didn't bother trying this.

Emacs.app - A Cocoa port of Emacs. This code has been recently integrated into GNU Emacs for the upcoming version 23, but you have to build from the CVS source for that, which is what I chose to do.

The page for Emacs.app contains instructions for how to build from GNU Emacs CVS, but I'll describe the process here:

You can define a keyboard shortcut for any bookmark in Safari (in Mac OS X). Here is how:

* Go to Keyboard & Mouse preferences and the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
* Click on "Application Keyboard Shortcuts"
* Click the + button
* Select Safari.app for Applicaton
* Put the exact title of the bookmark in the Menu Title (spaces are fine)
* Enter in your keyboard shortcut in Keyboard Shortcut

I have been watching the iPhone for a while, but just recently bought one. I'm going to keep updating this entry with my experiences with it so far and my opinions of it.

What it needs (to be competitive with other phones)

* Bluetooth A2DP support (stereo sound)
* Tethering of some sort (via Bluetooth or WiFi).
* Copy/Cut/Paste
* Bluetooth keyboard support
* A good solution for in-car use
* Voice dialing
* Support for more Bluetooth profiles in general
* Multi-media messages (MMS) support (ie picture messages)
* E-mail search options