Windows 10 Activation Issues on Mac Parallels 9 and 10 for Bootcamp VMs

Parallels has a neat feature to allow you to create a VM from a bare metal install of Windows in the Bootcamp partition (rather than having it installed to a file representing a virtual disk on the host). This allows you to either natively boot straight from the Bootcamp partition, or boot in a VM running on a Mac OS X host.

For Windows 8.x, this worked fine even though Windows Activation saw the bare metal install and when running in the VM as two different installs. Previously one would activate as normal, and the other would require a call to the Microsoft number to get a new activation code. Once you had activated both, then you could boot either and both would be activated from one license.

On Windows 10 however, it looks like which ever you boot second, it sees the activation code already used on one of your Windows 10 devices, and then refuses to activate. This is discussed in this Parallels forum post here. So far it seems if you leave Windows 10 booted for ‘long enough’ eventually it will activate itself? I’m having this issue, so leaving my unactivated native boot up and running for a while to see whether it activates or not.

Mounting Linux ext partitions on OS X

I wanted to check some files on an SD Card formatted in ext that I had used on my Pi and wanted to check if I had left some files in the home dir before I reimaged it. OS X doesn’t support ext formatted drives by default, but you add support using OSXFuse.

  • Install Fuse for OS X
  • Install the ext plugin for Fuse
  • Find the partition you want to mount with: diskutil list
  • Make a mount point – not sure on Mac OS X where is the best place, but I added /mnt/sdcard
  • Mount with:


    [code]sudo fuse-ext2 /dev/disk1s2 /mnt/sdcard[/code]

  • (replace with the /dev/ to your device)

I’m not sure if it’s best practice on the Mac to mount with sudo, but this worked for me for what I needed to do. Fuse mounts on ext are r/o by default, but there is experimental r/w support that can be enabled, check the docs.

Done!

Mac OS X Yosemite

Ars Technica has a fantastically detailed review (25 pages) of the latest OS X release, Yosemite. I’m browsing though the article as my 5.1GB download is slowly coming across the tubes. Maybe sometime tonight it will have completed and I’ll be ready to install 🙂

In the meantime, I’m wondering whether I like the ‘flat’ UI look, and prefer the 3d style icons and shadows in my dock, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

Java 7 & 8 install location on Mac OS X

Somewhere between Java 6 and 7 it seems I lost track of where your JDK gets installed on Mac OS X. Prior to Java 7, it seems it was installed to:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

with symlinks pointing to the exact locations.

I was just setting up a new Eclipse install and was looking for where my 8 was installed – it was clearly installed as ‘java -version’ was telling me I was running 8, but it was no longer in the above location.

/usr/libexec/java_home (which I’ve mentioned before here) was telling me the following:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_20.jdk/Contents/Home

Hmm, so there you go. Looking in /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/ I had multiple versions of 7 and 8. If you need to point Eclipse to a JRE location for your installed JREs, then from 7 onwards I think this is what you need.