Tag Archives: lion

OS X Mountain Lion Kills Parallels 6

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It seems I am unable to perform at least one Mac OS X upgrade without finding some major faults. This morning, Apple released OS X Mountain Lion, and like its predecessors, there was at least one show-stopping problem following installation – namely, that Parallels Desktop 6 no longer works.

Following installation of OS X Mountain Lion, upon startup, Parallels Desktop 6 shows the following message:


The only known solution at this time is to upgrade to Parallels 7 for $50.

Official Response

Parallels has posted a response on their website

A Senior Member of the Parallels team, whose username is YanaYana, has replied in the Parallels forum that although Parallels Desktop 6 will be continued to be supported for years to come, this does not include making it work on OS X Mountain Lion. The Parallels representative also commented that select users were offered a free upgrade to Parallels Desktop 7 for a short period when OS X Lion came out, although many users have commented they were not notified of the offer.

Abandoning Parallels

One user hit the nail on the head when they wrote “Is it worth to pay $50 more for a $20 OS upgrade?”. In fact, I have decided that unless Parallels fixes this issue or offers me an upgrade, I will not be purchasing a Parallels product ever again as a form of protest. After all, there are plenty of alternatives, such as VMware and VirtualBox, which I would rather use.

Update [07/26/2012]: As one user on the forum noticed by reviewing the Google cache, Parallels, Inc recently changed it’s policy to exclude Parallels Desktop 6 from working in OS X Mountain Lion: Knowledgebase article. See if you can spot the difference between the previous and current version of the page:

Before:


After:


Looking at older versions of the article shows that it had been active for months with the Parallels Desktop 6 text. Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest a user could have purchased Parallels Desktop 6 in the last year, believing it would work with OS X Mountain Lion. This smells of bait-and-switch tactics. Perhaps it is time for a class action suit?

installing postgres and tomcat on the mac

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Back when I was setting up my Mac, I installed Eclipse 3.7.  I also installed Postgres and Tomcat so I could run locally.  Postgres was either unnecessarily frustrating or it required knowledge I didn’t know I was missing.  The whole shared memory thing should have been a clue.  The good news is that I think I did almost everything wrong one could so I have a nice list of problems.  I wrote this up two months ago, but waited to post until I understood better what was going on.

I learned I didn’t know where the applications folder is on the hard drive.   First I learned you can view the path of a file in the finder. Which is all well and good.  It tells me the path is Macintosh HD > Applications > Eclipse.  Awesome.  On a UNIX file system, a directory has a slash up front.  Ok.  So I’m now at a UNIX prompt looking for it.  No Mac HD at the root level.  Volumes looks promising so I cd there and see Macintosh HD as a choice.  Great.  And there’s even an Applications folder under it with my apps!  I found it without having to use “find.”  That wasn’t bad, but it was more surprising than I expected.  I also noticed there is /Applications which will be more convenient next time.

Also, the “one click installer that doesn’t tell you what it is doing” installs some things by unzipping to the directory you are in, some files to /Library and presumably some files to who knows where.  Now I see the scripts I was expecting.

initdb doesn’t have enough privileges as me so I tried root and got initdb cannot be run as root.  Ok so it’s a real UNIX install where I need a user to run as.  I wasn’t expecting this because all my previous installs on the Mac have shielded me from a real UNIX install.

I thought I needed to create a  postgres user to run the database.  In Apple’s system preferences it tells me an id with that name already exists.  But /etc/passwd says nothing about it.  Running

dscl . -list /Users UniqueID

does turn up a postgres id. I need to figure out how the Mac Directory Service thing works.  Anyway, now that I know the postgres users exists I did “sudo passwd postgres” to reset the password to something I know.  Turns out the “sorry” message when trying to sudo to postgres wasn’t from an incorrect password.  Eureka!  I needed to type “sudo su postgres” and then type *my* admin password to switch.  Which kind of makes sense because my regular id isn’t allowed to switch user but my sudo admin user is.

I then changed owner of /Library/PostgreSQL recursively to postgres user.  A nice easy step.  (sudo chown -R postgres /Library/Post*)

Finally, I could run initdb and get prompted for the new superuser password!

I then tried to start the database and got a complaint the lock file already exists.

FATAL:  lock file “/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432.lock” already exists

HINT:  Is another postmaster (PID 94) using socket file “/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432”?bash-3.2$

Tried rebooting.  Error still there.  Turns out postgres automatically starts up.  I went on to create a user and database using the usual commands.

Then I opened pgadmin to see if I could access the database.

Connected – maintenance db is database name.

Almost there.  I used the wrong password for the id I created in postgres.  (This matters because the coderanch integration tests assume a certain password.  And because the one I picked I will never remember.)

alter user postgres with password ‘better_password’;

Importing data from file went smoothly.

Ongoing Little problems

  1. Copy paste from Eclipse doesn’t work.  You have to go through textedit.
  2. Postgres uses shift arrow key to select a line.  I wish Apple apps would all use the same convention.

Resources

  • http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/postgres.html
  • http://zanshin.net/2009/09/07/installing-postgresql-on-mac-10-6-snow-leopard/ – except for the building from source parts this was useful

Tomcat

Given how many problems I had with Postgres, I decided to follow a tutorial for Tomcat.  This one was easy to understand.  I know enough about the Mac to understand what the sudo is for (to be an admin.)  And the rest is pure UNIX – permissions, making a symbolic link, etc.

virtualbox between mac lion and ubuntu

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I installed VirtualBox a few weeks ago.   A few wrinkles when actually using it.

Copy/paste

By default, you can’t copy/paste between your Mac and VirtualBox VM machine.  It’s easy to enable though:

  1. Devices > Install Guest Addons
  2. Wait a few minutes for a terminal window to open and install
  3. When prompted, press return to close terminal window
  4. Restart the VM
  5. Now copy and paste works naturally.
Keyboard shortcuts
On the Mac, you use command c to copy and on Ubuntu you use ctrl c.  It was a bit annoying to switch between the two frequently.  I don’t really have a good way of dealing with this other than press command c and wonder why nothing happens.  Ideas?
Command tab
I’m big on command tab.  The problem is that Virtualbox eats/disables it.  Which means every time I switched from my browser or Open Office to the VirtualBox install, it was awkward to get back.  I would up solving this by creating three desktops on Lion (spaces.)  One was VirtualBox Ubuntu Linux.  The second was the Open Office document with the book I was technical proofreading (Well Grounded Java Developer.)  The third was my browser/finder windows/etc.  This was helpful.  It let me three finger swipe as I was reading and command tab for the “little swaps” within my main desktop.  This fit my mental model well.  The only thing I didn’t like was that I had to put Open Office back in desktop #2 each time I opened a new chapter.