I could not find a way to remove the partition via the Mac OS X Disk Utility, so I resorted to some terminal work. By clobbering the first few bytes of the disk’s partition map, I essentially made the whole disk look like random garbage, and TrueCrypt no longer presented a warning. This will cause data loss, so be careful.

First, find the drive’s device number using Disk Utility. Right click on the drive (not one of the partitions) and select “Information.”

Look for “Disk Identifier” in the property list. In this case, my drive is called disk3, which corresponds to /dev/disk3 on the filesystem. Tomorrow it might be disk4 or disk6, so don’t make any assumptions here. Failure to find the correct drive number in this step will cause you to erase the wrong drive in a future step.

Open up your terminal and umount this disk’s volumes. Note the asterisk, which should be included in your command.

• sudo umount -f /dev/disk3*

Unmounting drives in the Finder will make the disk unavailable in /dev, and we need this block device if we’re going to clobber the filesystem.

Once the partitions are unmounted, we can write junk to the partition table and essentially unformat the drive. This is the dangerous part, so don’t screw it up or you will destroy the wrong drive, lose all your data, and seriously hate life. Replace disk3 with your drive identifier!

• sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk3 bs=1 count=1024

After writing zeroes to the front of the drive, TrueCrypt happily made an encrypted volume on the disk.

1. :syn on. These colors suck. Look for themes.
2. 4 bit themes suck. Let’s set up an 8 bit color terminal.
3. Leopard’s Terminal.app fails, install iTerm 0.9.6.
4. iTerm works, but I use GNU screen all day. Recompile screen with --enable-colors256.
5. screen wins, but doesn’t play nice with the delete key in iTerm. Fix it.
6. Compile Vim 7.2 for 8 bit support.
7. Get an 8 bit theme. set t_Co=256 in .vimrc.
8. " syntax highlight html files using the php highlighter
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.html set filetype=php

9. Install FuzzyFinder for good measure now that we’re out of Vim 6.3 territory.
10. Start saving seconds/minutes/hours of my life that before were consumed by syntax errors.

Installation

During the machine setup, I was prompted to do a “Linux Easy Install.” The software auto-populated my full name and username, and asked me for a new password. I let it do its thing, having already pointed it to the Ubuntu installation ISO. A short while later, with no additional interaction, I was at the Gnome login screen. The username and password I had chosen during installation worked great.

Interface

The feature that finally pushed me over the 2.0 edge was Unity support in Linux. In the past I have only run server applications on my VM, but I had to see Linux Unity in action, layering my Linux applications with Mac OS X applications. It doesn’t disappoint.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Headless” mode. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. When I’m using the server capabilities of my VM, I don’t want an extra application cluttering up my alt-tab. Now: “Enter Headless,” quit VMWare Fusion. Simple. I assume the VM will suspend if I shut down the computer, but I haven’t tested it yet.

The new library window is a bit more attractive, and the machine settings list is more compact. The list also shows a live thumbnail of your VM’s display, be it console or graphical. Along the same lines, the console display can now be resized to zoom the terminal text in or out.

The Gnome application menu is also accessible from the Mac OS X Dock. Apps can be launched in Unity mode without restoring the Gnome desktop.

Seamless cursor movement between the Linux and Mac desktop, along with VM resolution adjusting to the size of the machine window, are also great features, though I suspect they were present in Fusion 1.0.

Some Other Section

Looks like the VMware Fusion team has been up to good things since the first release. I haven’t yet tried Parallels, but I can’t see a reason to try anything new from where I’m sitting.

I installed Thunderbird and I’m surprised how much I like it. I was never fond of the Windows version. Some of the Mac build’s UI elements are noticibly non-standard and sluggish, but it’s better suited to power users (subscriptions, variety of config options) and the threading is just like Mutt’s: no false message acting as a thread header, and replies are indented in the tree order I’d expect.

And of course, $LUSER is just shorthand for “local user,” as any sysadmin knows.

Update, 7 April, 2005: Looking back at this script posting, the linebreaks are a bit out-of-whack, so a copy/paste of the code will not work. Script monkeys will be able to spot the errors, but if anyone has major headaches I can help point out the problems.

Turns out a user is free to change this functionality. Open the “Tools” menu, and select “Rules.” Double-click the “Send and Receive All” rule, and click the account options button next to your target IMAP account. You’ll be presented with a list of all the folders in your account. Checking the box next to a folder displays a corresponding popup menu for setting synchronization options, defaulting to “Headers Only.” Select your preferred setting, ie. “All Messages” to download every byte of each new message when you check your mail.

Nifty.

Here’s a Mac OS X tip for y’all: cron on Mac OS X has the ability to run commands only when operating on A/C power:

The command can optionally be prefixed by “@AppleNotOnBattery ” to tell cron not to run the command when functioning on battery power. For example, the “sixth” field when using this option would appear something like “@AppleNotOnBattery /usr/bin/touch /tmp/foo”

I signed up for hosting from JVDS. $20 a month gives me root on my own Slackware Linux 9.0 UML. I’ve been configuring it over the past few days, and initial impressions are very good. I’ve configured BIND to be the name server for my new domain, and Apache is happily serving up several vhosts. Let me also say that qmail is the most wonderful piece of software in the world. It loves Maildir even more than I do, which is saying a lot.

An application should always present a window when its Dock icon is clicked. This behavior compensates for the all-too-familiar case where a user closes a document window and thinks she has quit the application. The next time the user wants to use the application, indicated by a click on its Dock icon, a new window opens so that the user is absolutely sure that the application is active.

Does anyone else find this feature slightly annoying? Maybe I’m just used to Mac OS 9, but I don’t appreciate applications opening a window without my say so. Maybe I don’t want a huge browser window to pop up every time I switch to Safari. Maybe I switched to TextEdit for the open dialog, not a new blank document. This behavior is somehow intuitive? “All-too-familiar case,” indeed.