Throwing it all away and starting new

In the previous post I attempted to recover the partitioning of the drive and it looked like I had done it, but there were still issues afterwards apparently, mostly due to rEfit screwing things up (it has its own utility in the startup screen). I went back into the Disk Utility, which attempted a repair and then into gdisk, which caused more issues even then. The disk looked like this:

1 EFI

2 Mac OSX

3 Recovery

4 Recovery

5 Linux boot

6 Linux home

7 swap

It was impossible to zap any recovery and the MBR was a complete mess. I've basically done the following:

1. Recreated my external disk. 20G allocated to the mountain lion installer and the rest as a new partition for Time Machine. I just used Disk Utility and set up 2 partitions, pretty straight-forward. Make sure the partition type in Options is set to GUID partition table.
2. Created the Mac OSX installer partition onto the external drive. That's basically using the "Show package contents", finding the installerESD.img file and copying that into the partition using "Restore" in Disk Utility.
3. Saved my Mac OSX partition into Time Machine. Takes a while. Waited for Time Machine to complete.
4. Restarted the Mac and booting into the external drive with the installer. Press the Option key when rebooting the machine.
5. Completely repartitioned the main drive using the disk utility in two partitions. The first being the main Mac partition that I intend to use mostly as Mac OSX extended (Journaled). The second as free space. Note that there's no specific partition for the Recovery HD here yet. EFI is automatically created.
6. Then I restored the copy from Time Machine into the main partition. Waited for this to finish.
7. Rebooted into the Mac using the main drive (partition just created and loaded up).
8. Now you can recreate the Recovery partition at the end of this partition using this page: http://musings.silvertooth.us/2012/03/restoring-a-lost-recovery-partition-in-lion/ . Some more background info: https://plus.google.com/108724035107725322855/posts/Y33cF3cJR9o
9. Then I installed Ubuntu Linux using a special Mac Linux amd64 installer. The 10.10 version is available here: http://releases.ubuntu.com/oneiric/.
10. 
    

Mountain Lion installed!

Just found out why things were failing. There's an EFI partition on every disk that you're not necessarily seeing. First, you'd probably want to enable debug mode for the "Disk Utility" application:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Then, start Disk Utility, select the Debug Menu and tick "Show all partitions".
This allows you to see EFI partitions there.

The best indication of whether something is wrong or not is done by "diskutil". From the terminal, use:

diskutil list

This will pop up the partitions for your disks. My EFI was borked, as it showed "Microsoft Basic Data" there, but had the right size of 209.7 MB. This is the culprit that didn't allow my install of Mountain Lion to go ahead, plus some other issues with refit and those sorts. I've fixed this in a roundabout way, but you need an 8G or so USB disk or a spare HD (one of those USB types).

First, format the spare disk (disk1, where disk0 is your main startup disk) using the Disk Utility. Just select the spare disk, hit "partition" and make one large partition there. Then in Options, make sure "GUID partition table" is selected and that the type is "Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)" . Click OK to partition the drive. You can then "zero" the main partition as well by erasing it.

If you've downloaded the Mountain Lion Installer from the AppStore, this should be in your Applications folder. Don't open it to run it, but rightclick and "Show Package Contents". Then find the InstallESD.img file that you need in the "Contents/SharedSupport" folder there. This is the file you want to restore to the drive.

In Disk Utility, select the entire spare disk and select "Restore". Then drag the installESD.img file from the finder window into the source and the spare disk into the Destination. Hit Restore to transfer the image. What you need on the spare disk is the image, but also a prepended EFI partition on the spare too. This will be needed to copy the contents of the EFI to the main startup disk after we recreate it.

Now you can reboot the Mac. Keep the "Option" key pressed to reboot into this spare drive. What this does is that it frees up your main drive for some editing you need to perform.

Once you're finished booting into the spare mountain lion setup, open a terminal from the Utilities menu. In this terminal, verify your main startup disk is disk0, I'm assuming that for the following commands:

diskutil list

Verify that your main startup disk partitions are there. Verify that your spare disk has both the normal volume and the EFI partition too for copying that later. Do not continue if that isn't there. There's probably another mounted disk which is the install image contents.

gpt -r show disk0
diskutil unmountDisk disk0
gpt remove -i 1 disk0
diskutil unmountDisk disk0
gpt add -b 40 -i 1 -s 409600 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
diskutil unmountDisk disk0
gpt -r show disk0
diskutil list

You should now see your EFI partition back on the main drive.

The final step is to copy the contents of the spare drive EFI into the new EFI, assuming disk1 is the spare and disk0 is the main drive:

dd if=/dev/disk1s1 of=/dev/disk0s1

Let's reboot back onto the main startup disk to fix up some more issues.

On my drive, the MBR or partition scheme (whatever that is) was out of sync with the GPT table or whatever. Now you'd like to run "Verify Disk" on the main drive to verify it's all ok. This probably calls for a repair to sync things back up, set some other things back to what they should be. Once that's done, you should finally be able to install Mountain Lion on your main startup disk.

Note that I do have an Ubuntu & rEfit setup that caused this issue probably. I didn't care about Ubuntu being corrupted, so didn't pay any attention there. Later on I'll probably reinstall refit and verify things a bit better before continuing.

Hope that helps. If anything else is wrong, please don't write, because I'm far from a Mac expert.

My main issue with the install was that the installer complained about "Mountain Lion cannot boot from this disk".

Edit: After careful review I noticed there still were issues and Ubuntu still didn't like booting up. I've fixed that in a new post.

I'm one of those victims unable to upgrade from Apple Lion (10.7) to Mountain Lion (10.8). I'm working with a Mac Mini and have a dual-boot configuration. At first, the installer wouldn't let me upgrade at all because the RecoveryHD was missing. Through the help of a blog, I could download the Recovery installer from Apple (1.0 version) and then with a couple of terminal commands, I could recreate this in the current partition. In my setup, I moved my entire disk from what I had to a new SSD, so somewhere along the way the RecoveryHD got lost probably. Anyway, after that was created, the installer seems happy to prepare the install process and reboot. That's where the problems start. When the system reboots, I see the big "X" install process starting up and then it suddenly comes up with a dialog saying that mountain lion cannot be installed to the target location. That's when you find yourself in the purgatory between the installation process and nothing else, because not even EFI works at that point.

I've tried to slightly reduce the size of my "MacintoshHD" partition by 256MB, no luck. I've tried using the terminal to remove the EFI partition, because in my setup it shows as "Microsoft Basic" of some kind, which should actually be EFI. No luck due to "Resource busy".

In the end, at the top left in the Apple command, you can select the "disk" to use to restart the system. Select your regular, trustworthy MacintoshHD there and you're back into your regular EFI startup screen, where you can select either Apple or Ubuntu.

Some things are seriously wrong in the update process and I'm not sure I want to use the current software to do my updates. I'm going to try to write a report about this experience to see if Apple can redo some of this process or "auto-fix" some of the issues. I don't have anything valuable in the Ubuntu partitions that I care about (it's re-creatable in 1.5 hours or so), but the Apple philosophy is that things should just "work", and they don't without a proper indication of what failed.

So yeah... not a standard Apple as it's a dual-boot, but certainly using their hardware and some of the indications could be a bit more informative as to why things failed.

I've just upgraded my graphics card on the 2 year old beast and switched in a 1-yr old GTX 580 from Asus. I'm on a PCI-E 16x 2.x, so figured that the 3.x would yet be a bit of a waste of money and my primary concern is CUDA anyway and the number of cores is enough. This card will take me 2 years in the future anyway. The biggest issue when installing was figuring out the power connections. After the card was plugged in, the monitor showed "no signal". Fearing I was dealt a wrong deck of "cards", I tried switching the supply, but nothing. Then I figured out that the 6-pin PCI-E connectors also had a floppy 2-pin on the side. I stuck that in on both ends and the card magically worked. I don't know why the 8-pin to 2x 6-pin is supplied, but I'm not using that at all.

So my first test here on Linux was to see if the drivers work. OpenGL is active and it's all dandy.

Started up Blender and made a Cycles render with the CPU. This took 22 seconds for a complicated scene on the CPU. Then activated "GPU render" mode and the same window rendered in like 3 seconds. Fantastic difference when you consider the amount of time it may take for an animation, as this will cut down the rendering time a factor 8 or so.

Nice card, I'm happy. Now to wait to see if the card manages to stay on and perform well for the next couple of days. I saw on forums people sometimes get issues when playing particular games after a couple of days.

Cogl or OpenGL for 3D clutter scenes?

I'm using Cogl for a project, where I create an intuitive user interface for pilots. The starting point is a 2D background, actually a video through gstreamer, which shows the actual world. An overlay on that video, also called "OnScreenDisplay" or OSD or HUD provides some interesting numbers on plane speed, altitude and whatever else is of interest. In this different app though, I'm also painting in some 3D objects over the real image, which is intended to provide additional information on where things are located. Basically augmented reality. Since this is intended for video piloting, this seems like a very good combination.

In my first implementation I was using OpenGL directly. After some issues related to how to set this up, I had that working and things were showing up quite nicely and were spot on referenced. I then switched to gstreamer + gl extensions (glupload + glimagesink), but found that these were somewhat difficult to get absolutely right. The texture of the video was not as good as it could be due to some mipmapping issues. The gstreamer extension of clutter turned out better and clutter provides some interesting capabilities for painting text and a variety of other things, like bitmaps with animation and cairo for custom drawing.

Unfortunately, clutter uses cogl in the backend (apparently) and this means that the original code for augmented reality objects no longer worked properly. I tried to get this to work by saving opengl states directly and then paint it over the image, but that didn't work out. Although the position seemed correct, the material turned a solid or transparent grey. Due to the complexity of getting this to work properly, I decided to just bite the bullet and do this in cogl entirely.

What I started out with was to define a custom actor that can be plugged into the main render loop. The idea is then that this actor gets access to the state of the application at the right time, so that this decomplicates finding alternative ways to do your painting. If you don't do that, then you'll be painting direct opengl anywhere the application decides you should paint. Usually that's after buffers were flushed already, so you have issues with blending and things just look weird. So when you want to use 3D in clutter, you should use cogl to save yourself the pain. There are absolutely no guarantees if you do use plain old OpenGL and things don't work. I had unexplainable issues related to color, but the rest looked ok to me. That's why I went the cogl way to get more predictable results.

Once you have a custom actor, then override the paint method with this:

static void scene_actor_paint (ClutterActor *actor) {
CoglMatrix mvMatrix, pMatrix;

cogl_get_modelview_matrix( &mvMatrix );
cogl_get_projection_matrix( &pMatrix );

cogl_set_modelview_matrix( &matrix );

cogl_perspective( fov,
    (float)stage_width / (float)stage_height,
    zNear,
    zFar );

// Let pilot know its position and attitude
pilot_setPosition( telemetry.lat, telemetry.lon, telemetry.alt );
pilot_setAttitude( telemetry.pitch, telemetry.roll, telemetry.yaw );

// This rotates the world around the pilot...
pilot_display();

// show some objects
yyyyyyyy_display();
......

cogl_set_modelview_matrix( &mvMatrix );
cogl_set_projection_matrix( &pMatrix );
}

And then in order to render some other object in this scene:

void yyyyyyyy_display() {
   cogl_push_source( material );

   cogl_push_matrix ();
       cogl_translate( home_e, home_n, home_d );
       cogl_rotate( home_hdg, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0 );
       cogl_rotate( home_elev, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0 );

       cogl_polygon( vertices, 12, FALSE );      
   cogl_pop_matrix ();

   cogl_pop_source();
}

So this is how you jump out of the clutter loop:

1. Define a custom actor. I did one in C, another example uses the C++ version. See also here.
   
2. Define some properties that modify how things are rendered and some other general behavior.
3. Override the paint loop. Save the matrices, define your own matrices, call your custom drawing code in 3D (has to be cogl!) and then put the matrices back as you found them.

W5100 chip garbage output

I've got my hands on an Arduino + W5100 ethernet chip. This allows an Arduino to communicate with other clients over an ethernet connection.

When I compiled the example in Arduino however, there is one noticeable bug that is resolved in the newest ethernet library distribution:

http://code.google.com/p/arduino/issues/detail?id=605&start=200

The other thing is that the example code contains: if ( client == true ) , which can be replaced by a simpler ( if client ).

After these fixes, the W5100 behaves properly. On to the next challenge!