“In my career, I have managed the deployment of Macintosh labs and offices in colleges and elementary schools and at companies with a few workstations to those at major corporations.In handling most large-scale deployments or software upgrades, the most efficient solution is to use imaging, which places the contents of a master disk image on the hard drive of each workstation or computer. Creating and deploying a master image — whether you’re installing new computers, restoring computers to a default state or providing a massive system upgrade — can be a major task for any IT department.”
Read the article at ComputerWorld by Ryan Faas.
Hi there,
does anybody knows if there is is somekind of OSX emulator for linux? I would be really happy to be able to use iTunes and such on X86 Box.
x86 is bad at emulating PPC code due to lower number of registers (the reverse, emulating x86 on PPC is much better), so even if there was a flawlessly working emulator, you’ll need an awful lot of system resources just to run OS X.
So maybe with AMD64 things would improve? I heard something about intel releasing emulator layer for it’s itanium familiy in order prosessors would execute x86 code much faster?
i’m pretty sure that any attempt “emulate” os x is gonna fail. there are lots a reasons. but this is just something we need to accept. i for one, am planning on gettin a powerbook on real short order. so that solves my problem.
rumor has it though that itunes for windows will be coming in the near future. so you will be able to get on your x86, and who knows, maybe wine will support it. cross your fingers.
wow, talk about posting with total disregard to the topic though eh?
the only one available is MOL (Mac on Linux), available for the PPC distro’s.
Disk images only work when the hard drive is exactly the same size. They also have to have the same graphics cards.
Linux can be deployed in mass much easier on different configurations and it will automatically detect all the different hardware on each machine without having to find the drivers for them.
Try Sumi, or GNUPod to access your iPod, I use GTKPod http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net and it works great, setting it up was somewhat of a bear, but if you have kernel 2.4.19 at least, you are all set. If they do port iTunes to Windows you will probably be able to use it under Crossover Office like you would Quicktime 6, oh I know this is off topic but for people that are interested, I got Quicktime 6.2 to work with the newest version of Crossover.
A Windows version of iTunes? Not bloody likely.
However, since the iTunes Music Store is all done in XML, it’d be quite easy for Apple to deliver it via a web browser or small, specialized application for Windows users.
My guess is that Apple will open shop via Musicmatch, which they already ship with the Windows version of the iPod.
But I digress. This was a very interesting article. These types of administrative Mac articles are few and far between.
Chirs @ A Windows version of iTunes? Not bloody likely.
I found this on macrumors.com
Apple has already reported that they would be introducing their Music Download service for Windows later this year… and Forbes has already suggested that iTunes is coming to Windows.
As confirmation, Apple has posted a job listing on Monster.com for a Senior Software Engineer for iTunes for Windows:
Apple Computer is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to design and build one of our newest Consumer Applications, iTunes for Windows. Must be possess strong skills in the areas of application design, solid API design principles, user interface engineering, and have a strong understanding of customer and workflow issues. Experience with Windows logo certification preferred. Candidate should have a history of successful large volume consumer product shipment.
disk imaging Macs and benefits to IT support.
Why not just netboot? and have computers auto-update once a month, or however the IT person needs them to auto-update via software upadte. Also, backup can be automated. So the only question might be how can this all be controlled remotely? The tools are probably all there, but I am not very knowledgeable in this area.
In MacOS 9, ASR disk images can be deployed to HDs of varying sizes.
Macs tend to have more limited factory hardware configurations so you can actually remove a hard drive from a particular mac model and install it on to another Mac of the same or different model as long as that model can support the higher MacOS.
Actually, with OS-X, all the drivers for all supported Mac hardware are present in every install, so any disk image will boot any model.
There’s a few reasons this works, the simplest being that there’s nowhere near as much hardware to support in the Mac world. Also, because I/O Kit drivers (the Mac driver model) can inherit behavior from generic driver classes, each driver requires less code – on my laptop, the entire Extensions folder (which includes drivers, File Systems, network extensions, etc.) takes up only 43MB. Finally, all hardware drivers are loaded during boot, but a daemon goes through and unloads any that don’t match hardware to free up memory, so the OS adapts itself to the hardware it finds itself working with.
In addition to the advantages of this for large-scale management, a great example of this at work for home users comes when you buy new hardware. As long as the older hardware’s using the most up-to-date version of the OS, you can start the new one in FireWire target mode, mount it as a hard disk on the old one, and clone your entire disk contents onto the new one. You can then start up the new machine and it will (at least on the file level) be identical to the old one. This is also great if you drop your laptop and have to send it in for repair (not that i’d ever do such a thing) and have access to another machine.
The one exception is newly released hardware, which often has a newer build of the OS than you can get by running software update for a month or so.
Cheers,
John
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=17792667&AVSDM=2003~*…
If Apple really does this it is going to take away all incentive people have for buying a Macintosh
No, all it’ll do is give Apple more of a revenue stream. They lost money last quarter, and they need to get back into the black as fast as they can. People already have very little incentive for buying a Mac, and iTunes just isn’t going to be a deal-maker.
But, don’t you understand? The OS war is over. Apple lost it when player #3 (Linux) entered the arena and caused them to lose any hope of getting the corporate market. They’re accepting this fact, and they’re reinventing themselves as a media company. This is a smart move. By diversifying, they don’t put all their eggs in one basket (the Mac). I’m not saying they’ll drop MacOS, but I do believe they’ll focus more on services than software in the future.
-Erwos
— “Apple really does this it is going to take away all incentive people have for buying a Macintosh”
Not that iTunes isn’t an excellent product, and probably the best of its breed, but compared to all the other wonderful reasons to use a mac, iTunes alone is virtually meaningless. Having or not having iTunes would have zero affect on any possible future mac purchases for me.
Altiris also sells some really good software for managing the mac machines on your network. They also do Unix, Linux, and Windows machines.
Maybe they will offer iTunes and Quicktime for Linux, I mean MS is opening up their media format for Linux if Apple doesnt hurry it might miss the Linux train.
“If Apple really does this it is going to take away all incentive people have for buying a Macintosh”
Jared, hardly, something like that will only increase incentive to buy a mac. the i apps arn’t that all critical in buying a mac, I’m interested in buying a powerbook and iapps have nothing to do with it. But by releasing some apps for windows apple is drawing in more people to their world. For those who end up loving say iTunes they might be more inclinde to buy a mac for the other iApps. The reality of it is, very very few people are interested in macs because of iApps, they are just a nice thing to go along with the mac.
Also iTunes for windows would bring Apple a good deal of money as well. The massive numbers of potential sales, do to there being 30x times as many windows users as Mac, will far offset any posible sales loses in hardware.
Apple is a public company after all. Their goal is not to make great computers, breed a good religion or any of that, it’s to make money. In a hundred years apple could have nothing to do with computers as they find ways to make money. Look at most any public traded company that has been around for a long time, and compair their current money making plans with the companies original focus. If Apple see’s a way to bring in a whole lot of money, you can be sure they are going to do it.
http://www.macosxlabs.org/
“If Apple really does this it is going to take away all incentive people have for buying a Macintosh”
That statement sounds dumb cause it is.
On the topic, you can also use RevRdist to keep systems from getting mucked up. It basically rebuilds the system from a master image. The client software will check for added or deleted software and sync the client system to the master image. I don’t know if they will make a Mac OS X version.
> A Windows version of iTunes? Not bloody likely.
http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=1051741300