Can you teach an old dog new tricks?

by Volker Weber

He has done it before, and he is doing it again. You really should not run Mac OS X on a Windows machine, because there is no legal way to do it. And yes, it shows from miles apart, that this is a bootlegged VMware image.

So what is this all about? Until Notes 6.5 IBM used its own proprietary format to store Notes preferences, and with Notes 7.0.2 they went to the Windows INI format. The "notes.ini" file is called "Notes Preferences" but they might as well have called it "notes.ini" because that's what it is. Notes does not use the proper OS routines to store preferences.

To clarify: Mac OS X does not use a registry. Preferences are XML structures that were stored in plain text up to version 10.3, and now have a binary format. There is a Pref Setter application which lets you edit them, and there are OS calls to read and write them. Let's look at an example - com.apple.Terminal.plist:

com.apple.Terminal.plist.png

For Notes this should be "com.ibm.Notes.plist". Maybe in Notes 8.0.1.

Comments

Yes the apple guy at Lotusphere was very keen to let me know just how bad this was at the end of my VMware session.

Carl Tyler, 2007-02-04

You can convert binary plist files to text files (and vice versa) using "plutil" or you can open them with the Property List Editor, provided that you have installed the Apple Developer Tools. Or use the latest version of BBEdit.

Olav Brinkmann, 2007-02-04

Wuff!

Christian Brandlehner, 2007-02-05

"And yes, it shows from miles apart, that this is a bootlegged VMware image."

I guess it does if you know what you're looking for. Please enlighten me. How do you tell from a screenshot like that that you are looking at VMware?

Chris Linfoot, 2007-02-05

"disk0s1" could be an indication

Ole Saalmann, 2007-02-05

Ole, why? You can install osx on any disk slice you like.
After all it's this BSD-compatible that it lets you do things you can do otherwise with other BSDs (including bootable installation onto nearly everything bock-structured I can imagine).

So, on what basis do you extrapolate from disk0s1 that this is a VMware image? It could also be an OSX installation on a flash stick…

Regards,
/k

Karsten W. Rohrbach, 2007-02-05

I imagine the way Volker figured it was this:

Christian's initial posting about OS X on VMWare showed the installation being created on a partition called "disk0s1".

In the latest screenshots linked above, that same disk is still in use. So a reasonable extrapolation would be that he is still using OS X on VMWare.

Screenshots of the original post.

Ben Poole, 2007-02-05

@Karsten: it is just an *indication*.....

... and it might just be that most first time Mac owners rename their "Macintosh HD" to "disk0s1" :-)

Ole Saalmann, 2007-02-05

Ole: you got a point there, or two ;-)

Karsten W. Rohrbach, 2007-02-06

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