Posts Tagged snow leopard
Sysprep for Mac OS X
I admit it, for the last fifteen years or so I’ve been almost exclusively Windows-centric. I’m sure there’s a Mac-specific term for this but I haven’t found it yet. So, I’ll use sysprep for now.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Snow Leopard – Five Nice New Finds
It’s almost a month since the release of Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest release of it’s Mac OS X operating system. Allowing for shipping, I didn’t get my copy until a few days later. Not wanting to tempt fate, I waited for the weekend when I had a chance to do a full image backup as well as my normal Time Machine hourly backups.
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.