Macbook with a Multiboot System
April 11th, 2009
A short while ago I bought a 500 GB harddrive for my Macbook Pro. To be accurate: It is a Hitachi HTS545050B9A300 from the Travelstar 5K500.B series, which was released at the end of February. A nice thing is not only the additional space, but also that this harddrive consumes a little bit less energy than the original one. But I suppose the effect on the battery life is not very noticeable. The old harddrive is now used as external TimeMachine backup volume in an IcyBox.
But that’s not the real reason for writing this post. With the new harddrive I have enough space to run a triple boot system with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. In most tutorials to set up such an multiboot system is written that you can use only three partitions for it. But this is not absolutly right. Therefore, I will in show in the following post how to set up a multiboot system with more than three partitions and where there are really some limits to the partitioning. Additional to that I will cover problems with NTFS partitions and the msftres flag which may occur if you try to partition your harddrive for such a multiboot system.
To the topGraphic Tablet in Gimp under Mac OS X
February 11th, 2009
When I tried my new graphic tablet in Gimp under Mac OS X, I noticed that it did not work there. After searching the web for a while I read nearly everywhere either that tablets won’t work with Apple’s X11 at all or that the work, but not the pressure sensitivity.
Luckily, all this information was outdated. To get a graphic tablet working in Gimp under Mac OS X is really easy. All you have to do is to install the newest XQuartz and Gimp versions (for the links see below).
Once this is done you go to Edit > Preferences > Input Devices > Configure Extended Input Devices in Gimp and set the devices pointer, pen, eraser to the Screen mode (the names and number of your devices may differ, if you have another tablet).
My Wacom tablet is working very well now!