Massive on Macbook Pro
14 November 2007 01:38 Filed in: Work-การงาน
Disclaimer
:
This blog entry is an expression of my own opinion.
It does not represent view, policy nor roadmap of
Massive Software in any way, shape or form. I also
believed that whoever going to follow in my footsteps
should have good commonsense and some idea/bearing of
his/her own (in short, you know what the heck you are
doing). I am not responsible for your Macbook Pro
malfunction, lost of operating system and/or data.
Please READ THE WHOLE THING before trying anything
with your system.
Apple machines grew on me. I personally moved to Powerbook G4 12" along the way which lasted the amazing 3 years from my VFX house to my early time at Massive.
I moved from that to Macbook Pro 17" with ATI X1600 M display card. To my dismay, no matter how hard I tried, Massive did not work well with that machine. Here are the problems:
1) I tried VM solutions, Parallel and VMWare Fusion. Both sucked major toes on 3D acceleration support.
2) I then went Bootcamp route, installing Fedora Core 6 which supported Apple's hardware. Again, disappointment due to the useless ATI Linux driver. Additionally, running Massive on Fedora Core 6 with library incompatibility made it crash prone.
3) I even tried having Massive programmer compiled Massive on OS X using X11 sub system, horrible as well. X11 on OS X is no good with OpenGL. The only way to have anything decent on OS X is to rewrite Massive with Cocoa, its native library.
Finally, Apple came out with Macbook Pro with NVIDIA 8600GT Mobile display card and I have been eyeing it for sometime now. The only reason I was not taking a plunge was Leopard. I was waiting for Leopard to come out so when I get the new machine, I don't need to upgrade the OS.
A few weeks ago Leopard came out and I rushed to Apple store to get my new Macbook Pro 17" with high-resolution display (1920 x 1200). I hope that with the new hardware I will be able to finally run Massive on it. Here are the steps I took to set things up and get Massive running on my Macbook Pro.
1) After first boot of my new Macbook Pro, I connected a firewire 800 cable between my old machine and new machine, start up 'Migration Assistant' utility on my new machine, boot my old machine in firewire disk mode (by holding down 'T' key when the machine comes up). I followed the direction of Migration Assistant and managed to get all my old settings and data across in a few simple clicks. That's one beauty of the OS X and Mac, simplicity.
2) I then plugged in external USB drive, start up Time Machine for the first time and backing up the whole internal hard disk. I strongly recommend this step since we are going to adjust the partition table of the hard disk, a lot of things can go wrong and render total data loss. Alternatively you can use 'Disk Utility' to archive the whole disk image, or use its restore function to create a duplication of your OS X boot drive on an external drive.
3) Download Fedora 8 DVD image. I got the X86_64, the 64 bit flavor myself. Burn and verify the DVD make sure it is good. I use Disk Utility to do the job but you can go fancy with your Toast or Disco.
4)With all the precautions done, start up Boot Camp Assistant. Follow the steps and repartition the boot hard disk. I did give the second partition a size of 15GB.
5) Boot Camp will prompt you to insert Windows installation CD. Put in your Fedora 8 DVD and click start installation. Your Macbook Pro will reboot and start the Fedora 8 installation process
6) I've got a hiccup here. The first try of Fedora 8 installation run hung. I hard resetted (hold down power button for seconds) and try again. On the second try things went smoothly.
7) When I reached the drive partitioning of Fedora 8, I got my second hiccup. Fedora 8 just won't recognize the free space left in the drive. Somehow Boot Camp created this 128MB VFAT partition which got in the way and have to be removed. I then manually created partitions by copying from the default automatic setting of the Fedora 8 recommend partitioning scheme.
8) Of note here, some people recommend using rEFIt for booting and OS selection. I just go along with the old Boot Camp booter and GRUB for Linux. GRUB could be considered as an excess here, but I found it handy later when upgrading kernel, which allowed me the flexibility of selecting different kernel to boot. Experiment with rEFIt if you will.
9) After the installation of Fedora 8 is done, you should have your Fedora 8 bootable as 'Windows' partition when you hold down the 'option' key when starting up your Macbook Pro. Fedora 8 started up with the correct display resolution for me (1920 x 1200) but it was using basic 'nv' display driver for X. Of course, I proceeded to download NVIDIA Linux driver from NVIDIA site, the specific driver was Version: 100.14.19, Operating System: Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T), Release Date: September 18, 2007.
10) Well, if you need a bit of pointer on how to install NVIDIA driver, here it is. Log in as root to your machine. Fire up terminal and go to runlevel 4 for non-gui system by typing the command 'telinit 4' in the terminal. Then go run your downloaded NVIDIA driver by issuing the command 'sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-100.14.19-pkg2.run'. When asked whether you would like to compile the driver for your kernel, Okayed it. After the installation finished, reboot and you should see NVIDIA logo flashing at boot time when you are getting in X/gdm, confirming a success.
11) Install Massive per usual. I uses FC4_64 version of Massive and mhost which installed without a hitch.Checking with 'ldd massive' confirmed a perfect library compatibility between FC4_64 build of Massive and Fedora 8. When I started Massive, I was stuck with an odd fonts issue but that got resolved rather quickly by the Development team. I suggest you wait until this new fix made it into Massive builds before trying this for yourself.
NOTE: Fedora 8 by default will not recognize your Airport wi-fi card. I use ethernet to get Internet access and get OS update. Sound also did not work. Both, could probably be fixed but I am in no mood to do my Linux witch hunt at this point.
That's it! I now have a dual boot Macbook Pro with Leopard and Fedora 8 where I can run Massive very well. Last but not least, let me point out common mistake of Massive installation. After almost 2 years of overlooking support here are what I've gathered, kid gloves off :
- First and foremost, RTFM. A *lot* of people don't. The answer usually is there right in front of their eyes.
- Did not install proper NVIDIA driver downloaded from NVIDIA website.
- Use ATI display cards (unsupported at this point, and foreseeable future, until they do something about their sad state of Linux driver)
- Did not set proper environment variables, at least MSERVER needed to be set properly to get the license.
- Cannot reach their license server due to lack of network name translation machanism (DNS, host files)
- Run Massive on unsupported OS and don't even check for library compatibility
- The mhost ID has changed, and don't even know because did not keep the record of old mhost ID (duh!)
- Did I mention RTFM?
Of course, I do understand that expecting everyone to understand system administration is impossible, but if you are a TD worth your salt, pick up a book or two on it. Sometime you are your best chance of fixing things, your system administrator is not going to be there with you all the time, you know? (except in the case you married to one). Have fun running Massive on your MBP. Cheers!
Apple machines grew on me. I personally moved to Powerbook G4 12" along the way which lasted the amazing 3 years from my VFX house to my early time at Massive.
I moved from that to Macbook Pro 17" with ATI X1600 M display card. To my dismay, no matter how hard I tried, Massive did not work well with that machine. Here are the problems:
1) I tried VM solutions, Parallel and VMWare Fusion. Both sucked major toes on 3D acceleration support.
2) I then went Bootcamp route, installing Fedora Core 6 which supported Apple's hardware. Again, disappointment due to the useless ATI Linux driver. Additionally, running Massive on Fedora Core 6 with library incompatibility made it crash prone.
3) I even tried having Massive programmer compiled Massive on OS X using X11 sub system, horrible as well. X11 on OS X is no good with OpenGL. The only way to have anything decent on OS X is to rewrite Massive with Cocoa, its native library.
Finally, Apple came out with Macbook Pro with NVIDIA 8600GT Mobile display card and I have been eyeing it for sometime now. The only reason I was not taking a plunge was Leopard. I was waiting for Leopard to come out so when I get the new machine, I don't need to upgrade the OS.
A few weeks ago Leopard came out and I rushed to Apple store to get my new Macbook Pro 17" with high-resolution display (1920 x 1200). I hope that with the new hardware I will be able to finally run Massive on it. Here are the steps I took to set things up and get Massive running on my Macbook Pro.
1) After first boot of my new Macbook Pro, I connected a firewire 800 cable between my old machine and new machine, start up 'Migration Assistant' utility on my new machine, boot my old machine in firewire disk mode (by holding down 'T' key when the machine comes up). I followed the direction of Migration Assistant and managed to get all my old settings and data across in a few simple clicks. That's one beauty of the OS X and Mac, simplicity.
2) I then plugged in external USB drive, start up Time Machine for the first time and backing up the whole internal hard disk. I strongly recommend this step since we are going to adjust the partition table of the hard disk, a lot of things can go wrong and render total data loss. Alternatively you can use 'Disk Utility' to archive the whole disk image, or use its restore function to create a duplication of your OS X boot drive on an external drive.
3) Download Fedora 8 DVD image. I got the X86_64, the 64 bit flavor myself. Burn and verify the DVD make sure it is good. I use Disk Utility to do the job but you can go fancy with your Toast or Disco.
4)With all the precautions done, start up Boot Camp Assistant. Follow the steps and repartition the boot hard disk. I did give the second partition a size of 15GB.
5) Boot Camp will prompt you to insert Windows installation CD. Put in your Fedora 8 DVD and click start installation. Your Macbook Pro will reboot and start the Fedora 8 installation process
6) I've got a hiccup here. The first try of Fedora 8 installation run hung. I hard resetted (hold down power button for seconds) and try again. On the second try things went smoothly.
7) When I reached the drive partitioning of Fedora 8, I got my second hiccup. Fedora 8 just won't recognize the free space left in the drive. Somehow Boot Camp created this 128MB VFAT partition which got in the way and have to be removed. I then manually created partitions by copying from the default automatic setting of the Fedora 8 recommend partitioning scheme.
8) Of note here, some people recommend using rEFIt for booting and OS selection. I just go along with the old Boot Camp booter and GRUB for Linux. GRUB could be considered as an excess here, but I found it handy later when upgrading kernel, which allowed me the flexibility of selecting different kernel to boot. Experiment with rEFIt if you will.
9) After the installation of Fedora 8 is done, you should have your Fedora 8 bootable as 'Windows' partition when you hold down the 'option' key when starting up your Macbook Pro. Fedora 8 started up with the correct display resolution for me (1920 x 1200) but it was using basic 'nv' display driver for X. Of course, I proceeded to download NVIDIA Linux driver from NVIDIA site, the specific driver was Version: 100.14.19, Operating System: Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T), Release Date: September 18, 2007.
10) Well, if you need a bit of pointer on how to install NVIDIA driver, here it is. Log in as root to your machine. Fire up terminal and go to runlevel 4 for non-gui system by typing the command 'telinit 4' in the terminal. Then go run your downloaded NVIDIA driver by issuing the command 'sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-100.14.19-pkg2.run'. When asked whether you would like to compile the driver for your kernel, Okayed it. After the installation finished, reboot and you should see NVIDIA logo flashing at boot time when you are getting in X/gdm, confirming a success.
11) Install Massive per usual. I uses FC4_64 version of Massive and mhost which installed without a hitch.Checking with 'ldd massive' confirmed a perfect library compatibility between FC4_64 build of Massive and Fedora 8. When I started Massive, I was stuck with an odd fonts issue but that got resolved rather quickly by the Development team. I suggest you wait until this new fix made it into Massive builds before trying this for yourself.
NOTE: Fedora 8 by default will not recognize your Airport wi-fi card. I use ethernet to get Internet access and get OS update. Sound also did not work. Both, could probably be fixed but I am in no mood to do my Linux witch hunt at this point.
That's it! I now have a dual boot Macbook Pro with Leopard and Fedora 8 where I can run Massive very well. Last but not least, let me point out common mistake of Massive installation. After almost 2 years of overlooking support here are what I've gathered, kid gloves off :
- First and foremost, RTFM. A *lot* of people don't. The answer usually is there right in front of their eyes.
- Did not install proper NVIDIA driver downloaded from NVIDIA website.
- Use ATI display cards (unsupported at this point, and foreseeable future, until they do something about their sad state of Linux driver)
- Did not set proper environment variables, at least MSERVER needed to be set properly to get the license.
- Cannot reach their license server due to lack of network name translation machanism (DNS, host files)
- Run Massive on unsupported OS and don't even check for library compatibility
- The mhost ID has changed, and don't even know because did not keep the record of old mhost ID (duh!)
- Did I mention RTFM?
Of course, I do understand that expecting everyone to understand system administration is impossible, but if you are a TD worth your salt, pick up a book or two on it. Sometime you are your best chance of fixing things, your system administrator is not going to be there with you all the time, you know? (except in the case you married to one). Have fun running Massive on your MBP. Cheers!
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