What do I mean?  In Windows there’s a set of tools available that lets you build a reference computer with all the latest updates, pre-installed drivers and software and your own configurations.  Then you strip out all the bits that make it a unique computer such as user profiles and their associated passwords, unique computer identifiers and so on.  At the end of this you have a reference install of Windows that you can take an image of and deploy to other computers.  The first time you boot on a new computer it goes through some basic setup stuff and away you go.

Because I run a computer business that sells (and services) Apple computers I’ve been looking for a way to achieve the same sort of thing.  What follows in this article is the results of a some in-depth research and putting together bits and pieces from various sources.

My result is a disk image (.dmg) file that I can use to restore on any current version of Mac hardware (laptop and desktop – although untested on a Mac Pro) that will have a user environment I’ve already configured and with additional software that I’d like available.  It hasn’t got any pre-existing users created but runs the standard Apple welcome/setup process when first booted up instead – that way you get to create a new user profile for the new owner of the computer.

So, the process…

1. Create a default install of Mac OS X:

Using a current Apple system create a new install – if it’s a brand new (never used) computer, feel free to use that – of Snow Leopard.  When you get to the Welcome screens set up an admin user (for the purposes of this article, I’ll call this user tismyadmin).

Don’t skip out on setting a password for this user, it’s easier to make some of the later steps work if this user has a password set.  However, keep this password nice and short, by the time you’re done, you’ll be deleting this user again anyway so good security isn’t a necessity here.

2. System Updates:

After the system is logged in, apply all available updates from Apple.  Keep checking until you’ve got all updates (sometimes this might require a restart then checking for more updates).  Also, remember that if you later install other software from a CD or DVD that you may then need to download updates for this software as well.  If you’re doing this a lot you might prefer to manually download Combo updates.

3. Install Software:

Install any additional software you want to be included in your standard Snow Leopard install (e.g. Adium, Skype, VLC, Handbrake, etc).  This is basically just any software that you want to be available to a person using the computer.  Don’t worry about configuring any of this software yet, just get it all installed.

4. Create a New User:

Add a new user to the system (I’ll call this user defaultuser).  Make sure they’re an Administrator for the system.  As with your other user account, set a simple password for this user.

As with tismyadmin, you’re not particularly concerned with top security on this one.  By the time you’re done, this user also gets deleted.

5. Configure the User Account:

Restart and log in as defaultuser.

Go through System Preferences and set everything the way you want it.

Start each program, particularly if they’ve been downloaded from the Internet, and make sure the start up normally and with no warnings.  Unless you have specific configurations that you want to be defaults for an application (e.g. web browser download directory) don’t set configurations in applications.

DO NOT enter any usernames and passwords for programs – ultimately, they’ll end up saved as a default user profile and be available to every user on every computer you deploy this image to (i.e. this is a bad thing™).  If you have programs that you want to load on startup/login, set them here also.

6. Clean Up:

Clear caches on the defaultuser account – using Finder go to /Users/defaultuser/Library/Caches and delete the contents.  Make sure you empty the Trash (this might require you to restart and log in again as defaultuser).

Run Keychain Access (Applications/Utilities), select “login” and delete (from File menu).

Clear histories (Apple symbol -> Recent Items -> Clear Menu).

7. Set Up System-wide Default User Account:

Restart the computer and log in as tismyadmin.

Run Terminal (Applications/Utilities) and type “sudo -s” and enter your password for tismyadmin when prompted.

NOTE:  This is now a root shell, tread carefully!  You can do serious damage messing around at this level if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

Clear out the existing system-wide default account:

rm -rf /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/*

(I found this sometimes didn’t work as expected and I needed to remove each individual sub-folder separately, check that English.lproj is empty after this step and delete anything left as needed.)

Copy your new default account to the system default account:

cp -R /Users/defaultuser/* /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj

At this point, you’ve now got the start of a system-wide default user profile – this is what gets used every time a new user is created on the system, including the first user when you go through the Apple Welcome process on a new computer.

Type “exit” to get out of the root shell and then close Terminal and reboot the computer.

Log in again as tismyadmin.

8. System Cleanup:

Run Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities), select the hard drive and, under the First Aid tab, run “Repair Disk Permissions“.  If you got things right to this point you’ll see a whole stack of information where this fixes permissions for the system-wide default user profile you’ve just copied.  If you miss this step, permissions issues may get in the way when you create a new user later.  Once you’re done, close Disk Utility.

At this point, you can now delete your defaultuser account.  You won’t need it any further.

9. System Cleanup – Part Two (Single User Mode):

Doing this needs you to spend some time using low-level tools in Snow Leopard.  This can have dire consequences if not done right.  You have been warned!

Reboot the computer into single user mode by holding down COMMAND and S while rebooting.  If you’ve done it right, you’ll end up with a black screen that has white writing on it.  There’s no graphical user interface for this, it’s all typing.

Once you’ve got a command prompt, enter the following commands and WATCH to make sure you don’t get any errors – if you get errors, time to figure out what went wrong and fix it before you go any further.

fsck -fy
mount -uw /
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist &
dscl . -delete /Users/tismyadmin
rm -rf /Users/tismyadmin
rm -rf /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
shutdown -h now

What does this do?  Basically, it gets rid of your tismyadmin user account in an operating system compliant way (no loose ends) and resets the computer to run the Welcome process again.  At the end of this, you tell the computer to shut down because this is safer than letting it try and reboot and missing your chance to do the last step for some reason.

10. Create Your Disk Image:

At this point, you’ve got a computer that’s turned off and is ready to start as a new computer with no existing users but all your configurations and software installs ready to go.

From here, you need to create a disk image of the computer’s hard drive so you can deploy this build to another computer.  For that you’ll need an external hard drive that’s been set up so you can boot from it (there are plenty of references for that out there – I’ll write one myself some day).

Boot from your external hard drive.

Run Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities – although I have this in the dock on the install on my external hard drive).

Select the internal hard drive on the computer and click the “New Image” button.  Give your disk image a name and select somewhere on your external hard drive to save the disk image.  When you’re done, hit the “Save” button and wait for the disk image to create.  This may take quite a bit of time if you’ve installed a lot of software.

When this is done, you’ve now got a disk image of your fresh-minted Snow Leopard install.  In order to make this disk image useable, you also need one final step.  In Disk Utility, go to the “Restore” tab and load your new disk image in the “Source” box.  Then go up to the “Image” menu and select “Scan Image for Restore“.  Again, this process can take a little time but once it’s done, you have a disk image that you can use.

(Note: If you prefer to use Carbon Copy Cloner you can skip this step, I have done it either way but found that Disk Utility gives me a faster overall restore from disk image and, ultimately, in a commercial workshop, time is money so I’ve gone with the faster method.)

11. Using Your Disk Image:

Easy!  Boot from your external hard drive (the same one you have your disk image saved on) and run up Disk Utility.  Select the internal hard drive on the computer you want to build, select the “Restore” tab and then load your disk image in the “Source” box.  Drag and drop the internal hard drive to “Destination” and hit the “Restore” button – away you go.  Some time later you can restart the computer from the internal hard drive and start a normal setup process including the Apple Welcome screens.

(Note: At some point, I’ll add more detailed step-by-step guides for some of this stuff including screen grabs – for now I wanted to record the whole process while it’s fresh in my mind.)

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The actual upgrade went off fine.  I upgraded over the top of my current install and didn’t see any “deal breaker” problems resulting.

There’s already a significant tonnage of stuff about Snow Leopard so I’m not going to go into general reviews or benchmarks.  I’d expect my experience to be much the same as already reported anyway.  Instead, I wanted to touch on five small, new, features that I really like.

First up, for this “switcher“, I missed being able to see the date with a quick glance.  I hadn’t really realised now often I look at the date during the course of a normal day, but, apparently, it’s pretty regularly because the absence of this very small feature niggled.  Sure, I could have had this back using iStat Menus but I wasn’t really happy with that aspect of the program and, instead, just dealt with it and got used to looking at the WinXP computer next door to my Mac.

Thanks to Snow Leopard I can now have the date visible right up there next to the clock.  I’m glad to have it nice and visible again.

In normal use, I always seem to end up with a large number of applications running.  I also like having the programs I commonly use in my dock.  Before Snow Leopard, each program minimised also added an icon to the dock.  This could result my dock getting really out of control – since I like my dock on the right side of the screen it also meant I was ending up with some really tiny icons in the dock.

Enter a wonderful extra configuration option for the dock (minimise windows into application icon).  This has really helped me with a more consistent dock.  It also helps the “muscle memory” for moving the mouse to the same place every time to access the same application.

For me, Expose is one of the stand-out features of Mac OS X.  It offers a really quick and strongly visual way to find a program/window you’ve got open.  As a way to switch between tasks or cross-reference information I’ve found it very functional.  One of my niggles has been that Expose would only show windows that were visible on screen.  If you minimise it to the dock then it doesn’t show up in Expose.  This made worse if you happen to have more than one instance of an application (e.g. Firefox) open at once.

Snow Leopard’s changes to Expose were a welcome addition.  A dividing line in the lower half of the screen separates open windows (at the top, and larger) from minimised windows (at the bottom, and smaller).  Excellent changes Apple, thank you.

Yes, I know it’s a small thing, but visually appealing matters.  For me, I like transparency on things.  It doesn’t really enhance the functionality of the computer or anything, I just like seeing my screen look good.

Finding a switch for making the menu bar translucent was a nice addition.  It’s only an on/off option and there’s no control there for changing the level of transparency but it’s a nice addition none-the-less.

So, there’s four nice little additions that I’ve found to enhance my enjoyment in using my MacBook.  None of them are really world-changing or earth shattering but they’re things I like.

I’d really like to find a nice screen saver but the few reasonable ones I had in Leopard seem to have failed to come through with the upgrade to Snow Leopard.  I guess I’ll have to take some time out to do some more searching and see what I can find.

What’s that?  I said five and there’s only four?  Oh, OK.  The last one isn’t really Snow Leopard itself.  Instead, it’s the nice update that meant I could keep some convenience stuff in my menu bar – in particular disk activity.

Yep, just a week or two after the release of Snow Leopard, the folks at iSlayer and their lovely little iStat Menus application.

There’s been some changes for the new version that I had some mixed feelings about at first but it’s grown on me and I’m happy to have my disk activity indicator back again.

Are there niggles with Snow Leopard?  I’ve had a few.  For me, the least convenient one so far is that a move to increased 64-bit capability has resulted in some preferences apps now need you to restart preferences when you load them.  One especially, SynergyKM, mattered for me.  I use Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse from my XP desktop onto my MacBook and whenever it glitches I have to load the preferences app to de-glitch it.

Overall?  I’m happy.

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After a couple of years using Vista I’d come to like the sidebar for it’s ability to provide information “at a glance”.  In particular, it’s nice to be able to see basic system performance information like CPU load, RAM usage and system temperature – knowing this stuff helps understand if a system performance issue has an obvious cause.

I also miss having a drive activity indicator.  From some web searching it seems clear that Apple industrial design considers a drive activity LED to be superfluous.  In some ways I agree, things are either working or they’re not.  However, when I run an application, if I can’t see it loading it’s nice to at least see some drive activity to know that it has started.

It turns out that both of these niggles had, for me, the same solution.  A nice little tool called iStat menus.  This terrific little utility adds a few (user customiseable) extra items to the menu bar at the top of the screen.  In my example at left, I’ve added temperature, hard drive, RAM and CPU information.

Each one of these items can have a drop down menu attached to it that provides further information related to that item – in my example image, it’s showing additional information on hard drive storage.

I’ve found iStat menus has really helped me with those small visual queues about the health of my MacBook and helped my effective use through giving me a visual indication that something’s actually happening even if there isn’t (yet) a splash screen or other indication of, for example, a program that’s loading.

Another one of those all important little tools that I needed is Synergy.  This great little program shares a keyboard and mouse between multiple computers over a network.  I normally have a Windows desktop (well, it’s monitor, anyway) beside the MacBook and prefer to use just one keyboard and mouse on both computers when I can.

I started out trying to install the standard Mac version of Synergy and found it looking far more complex than it seemed to need to be.  Some further research turned up an alternative version designed for Mac.  While it appears not to have been updated for a while but I’ve not found any issues with it on OSX Leopard.

The last major “must have” for me was the ability to monitor Internet usage on my ISP (Internode).  As with other aspects of these tweaks, I really wanted something that was visible at a glance during normal use.  The solution I found was NodeToad – a nice little tool that puts an icon in the menu bar with an indicator of Internet usage.

As with iStat menus, the tool can be configured for how it displays this status and also has a drop-down with further information (as pictured) about current and historical usage.

Next up in this I’ll look at my experiences with Parallels and XP on the MacBook.

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My day to day life includes the businesses that I’ve been running for years (one of them over ten years, the other one about four years).  They are established and have fully developed processes that are followed by everyone.  While I can adjust some of these processes to take into account my Mac, there are limitations on what I can impose on others.

In a previous post I talked about what worked out well for me.  This post, however, is about the parts that didn’t work, what I’ve done to work-around for now and what I plan to put in place to completely resolve the issues as I move forwards.

The first obstacle has proved to be email.  I’ve used Microsoft Outlook for many years (and Outlook 2007 for the past couple of years).  With this kind of longevity of use I’ve arrived at ways that I handle email (and contacts, calendars, to-do lists) that are dependant on Outlook.

In moving to the Mac I figured I’d just go with Office for Mac and all would be good.  The first shock is that Office for Mac doesn’t include Outlook.  Instead, it includes Entourage.  As this is the ‘equivalent’ program it’s the one I’ve decided to use (for now).  At the moment, I’m not feeling very comfortable with my decision.  There are so many little things I was used to doing with Outlook that don’t quite come through to Entourage.  I’m giving myself some time and persisting at the moment on the basis that many years of Outlook use has resulted in me getting settled in a rut leading me to my current frustration.  i.e. it’s not that Entourage is ‘worse’ than Outlook, just that it’s different enough that I can’t just use it in the same way I was using Outlook.

Unlike many other parts of using Mac where I’ve now reached a semi-automatic level, I find myself still having to think about things in Entourage.  If this doesn’t show signs of changing soon I’m going to have to start looking at alternatives.  At this stage, I’d guess the next alternative will be to use the included OSX mail, iCal, address book applications and see if they integrate well enough to give me the kind of functionality I’m after.

The other part of this niggle is that Entourage can’t import PST files from Outlook.  In the end I found information on the web that suggests you can use Thunderbird as an intermediary in the conversion process and this appeared to work for me but ultimately failed to fully transfer through.  This is almost certainly my fault – my standard Outlook config meant that I usually had 4-6 separate PST files open at once and the Thunderbird import tries to import everything from Outlook in one go (probably something over 10,000 separate emails in my case).  Parallels/XP to the rescue.  Just installed Office (which I needed for a few other things anyway) and configured Outlook not to ‘do’ email but to load all the PST files I needed.  It does mean I need to load a different program to refer to my old email that it’s not the first time I’ve been in that position.

One aspect of the business is that I keep some on-going KPI’s and stats in an Excel spreadsheet.  I’ve been using some of the clever conditional formatting that Office 2007 offers and have found these don’t translate into Excel on Mac so I’m still loading my stats spreadsheets on the Parallels/XP side of things.

While on the subject of Microsoft, the other glaring ommission for Office is a lack of Publisher.  So far, I haven’t found anything that’ll open Publisher files on OSX.  My current solution is to keep using Publisher under Parallels/XP for now while I seek other solutions.  I have far too many documents, templates, flyers, etc in Publisher format just to abandon them all.

My best hope at the moment is that I’ll find a way (probably under Windows) to move the Publisher stuff into InDesign and then go over to using that entirely for DTP stuff.  While I’ve tried doing cut/paste from Publisher (Parallels/XP) to InDesign (OSX) without success, I haven’t tried it when I’m dealing entirely with a Windows platform.  The business still has this capability and I just have to find the time to check and see if it’ll work.

I haven’t played with any of the iWork suite of programs yet so this might offer some viable solution for this – when I’ve put together the cash to buy iWork I’ll try it and see.

If you know of some other way of moving a few hundred .pub files into something OSX understands I’d love to hear from you.

That pretty much takes care of the Microsoft-related issues.  Honestly, I’m very happy that there are so few niggles in this respect.

The businesses all use QuickBooks for accounting.  Not that I’m surprised but there’s no Mac version of QuickBooks available so this program also makes it onto the Mac as a Parallels/XP thing.  However, given the problems that financial software (be it MYOB, QuickBooks or many other options) have even coping with a normal Windows install I’ve found the software works very well in a Parallels/XP environment so this isn’t really causing any problems.  We’re generally very happy with QuickBooks for our accounting needs so I can’t see a move to something that does Mac any time soon.

Aside from this, the only other hold-out that stays on the Parallels/XP install is a poor excuse for software called Catalyst.  This is the program that I have to use to interact with the company for whom we do HP warranty work.  Even on a standard Windows computer the software is unstable – under XP it might crash half a dozen times or more just doing basic job updates.  Bizarrely, under Vista it was actually more stable.  Since I’m running Parallels/XP I’m back to the standard level of (in)stability for Catalyst that I was used to under XP previously.  It doesn’t work any LESS well though, so no use complaining.

After about two months, I’m now using the MacBook for everything that I was using Windows for (except running my engravers – they run on a dedicated computer just for that purpose anyway so this isn’t really a cop-out) and with few exceptions have found myself using Mac for almost everything.

Generally, I’ve found initial teething issues with understanding Mac and OSX and it’s standard layouts for programs but, once understood, I’m finding the consistency across applications to be really useful.  I’ve mostly gotten used to not having a task bar or a start menu (in the way that Windows has them, anyway) and generally find that I’m happier with how OSX handles these than Windows anyway.

Next up, the road to productivity – the little tweaks and add-ons that went into getting my daily use of Mac the happy experience it’s become.

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Over time we all end up with our favourite applications that let us do what we need in the way we are used to doing it.

In moving from Windows to Mac I was determined not to just cop-out and install Parallels and XP and just keep using all the Windows programs I was used to using.  I wanted to do as much as I could in native Mac.

As a starting point, I went looking for programs I’m used to using in Windows that have an equivalent in the Mac world.

Initially, there are a few commercial applications that I need on a daily basis:

• Microsoft Office – especially Word, Excel, Outlook and Publisher.  Office for Mac offers different bundled applications to Office for Windows.  While Word and Excel are common, there’s no Outlook or Publisher.  I’d expected Word and Excel to be largely the same under both platforms but, in reality, they are quite different.  After putting in the learning curve on getting used to the ribbon, I find that the Mac versions implement things quite differently and now I’m learning yet another interface within a same program.  As for Outlook and Publisher, just out of luck (more on that later).
• Adobe CS Collection – in Windows I used Photoshop regularly and the other Adobe applications in spurts of heavy use followed by periods of no use.  With the move to Mac and a lack of a good way to handle Publisher I’m now coming to grips with InDesign.  I’ve also failed to find a good offering for my favourite Windows web editor (HTMLKit) and have decided to move to Dreamweaver as a result.  In the end, the lack of some good alternatives has meant that I’m moving more heavily into the Adobe camp.  I sort of expected this to happen given Adobe’s long history with Mac software.
• Of course, no conversion is going to be complete and I’ve had to keep Parallels/XP around for a number of particular requirements.  More on these in a future post.

Commercial applications get you only so far.  Beyond this, there’s many FOSS-style offering that form part of my daily ‘kit’ of essential software:

• Firefox – I probably should give Safari a chance to be my browser of choice but I’ve been using Firefox for years and I’m happy with how it fits together so I stayed with it.  In the future, I’ll probably give Safari a longer trial and see how well it suits my needs.  My browser use means that I’ve really never needed much in the way of add-on tools so I can’t really comment on how well browser add-ons work in a cross-platform way.  (if you want to know if your favourite Firefox add-on works under MacOS let me know and I’ll try it out for you.)
• Remote Desktop (Microsoft) – I have to connect into my servers for various sysadmin tasks and this all happens on RDP so having an offering (direct from Microsoft) is very useful.  I have noticed that RDP from a Mac seems a little less responsive than RDP under Windows.  Because of that, I may still end up trying out a VNC-based alternative.  Stay tuned for more on this.
• RSS Owl – after trying out any number of RSS readers I settled on RSS Owl over a year ago.  The way it works suits my needs in RSS better than anything else I’ve tried and I wasn’t looking forward to having to find another alternative.  Knowing it was a FOSS offering I took a punt that it might be cross-platform and checked their website – yes, there’s a Mac version.  Nicely, the Mac version works almost exactly the same as the Windows version and I was able to just export/import my configs straight across and keep using it as normal
• FileZilla – no self-respecting web developer can live without an ftp client.  Many years ago everyone on Windows seemed to just use ws-ftp and I even purchased a version of this back in Win 9x days.  For the past few years, though, I’ve been using FileZilla and have been extremely happy with it.  Once again, there was a native Mac version and I was able to just cut over without any hassle.
• iTunes – I’m a relatively recent convert to iPod after having owned a range of non-Apple MP3 players.  Most of the alternatives I was using sync’d well through Windows Media Player.  I moved to iPod about six months ago and, along with that, moved to iTunes in Windows.  As expected, iTunes on Mac wasn’t a problem.
• Citrix ICA – my business is an authorised service provider for a few computer manufacturers and some of these companies use a Citrix-hosted application for managing jobs.  Lack of Citrix would have been a problem but, again, there’s a native Mac client that smoothed out any issues that might have occurred.

All in all, the biggest hassle so far has been forcing myself not to just take the easy way out when I run into some task that I need to get out of the way quickly by going back to the “Windows way”.  Instead, I’ve researched ways to do the same thing under Mac although at times this has resulted in serious loss of productivity (taking half a day to get to the point where I could update a simple web page being one memorable instance).

Still, it’s not like I haven’t done this before – I’ve been a full time AmigaDOS user who converted to Windows; a full time Windows user who converted to Linux, and then dabbled in OS/2; a full time Linux user who transitioned back to Windows (albeit mixed environment as, to this day, I still run some things under Linux); and, now, a primarily Windows user transitioning to Mac.

Probably the most significant difference this time is that my Mac has Parallels and XP installed.  I have an easy alternative available if I need it (just run the Windows program under Windows and be done with it).  The temptation is always there but as I gain familiarity with Mac it’s becoming less of an issue.

Next up, I plan to talk about the stuff that didn’t make it through the transition and how I’m planning to work around the problems this brings with it.

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