Printing to Windows 7 printer from OSX 10.5

Recently upgraded home machine which serves our printers / file shares from XP -> Win 7 Professional - after nasty spyware infection. (That's another story. I would just say - having a boot disk of Ubuntu to restore the registry was great - Since we did not have XP restore console, or restore XP boot disk) However, even after I was able to use kewl tools like  Malwarebytes and Counterspy and  Combofix to remove the vast majority of the crap (Along with a bit of Hijack this, and diligent observation with Process Explorer... Things were stable, but we  still did not trust the resulting system... Plus it was heavily loaded and sagging due to 6 years of built up cruft. Thus the move to Win 7.

Post-upgrade, OS X machine would not print to Win7 direct connet printer, or browse shares on the Win7 box. A few things seemed to help fix this problem.

• Re-share printer - less than 15 characters in share name, no blanks.
• Edit Local policies->Security -> Network Security- set: 
• "Send LM & NTLM -- use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated" and
• Turn off "require 128 bit encryption"
• In Win 7 Network sharing center
• Turn off Win 7 networking option "homeboy" "homegroup"
• enable Network Discovery and File and Printer Sharing.
• Make sure that OS X has the proper workgroup set in sys prefs -> network -> advanced -> wins
• Reboot Windows 7

Later I discovered that some had fixed the problem by sharing the printer from windows via lpd.
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7performance/thread/bd920e46-dbeb-4bb2-a38e-8791facd0608  As obsessive as I am about figuring things out, I did not try this yet.

Messing around with Java & Eclipse

I already had Java installed from Apple site I have latest version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard(10.5.8) with recent Java updates installed on a core 2 duo Mac.
Need to run Java 6 EE with Eclipse EE version.

Useful info:

1. Make Java 1.6 the default Java execution environment: Run Java Preferences.app (in Finder -> Applications -> Utilities). I changed the Java versions to default to using Java 1.6 by drag Java SE 6 to the top of the application and applet lists.
2. Which java version am I running?:  In a terminal window use: /usr/libexec/java_home
3. When creating a Java project, Eclipse prompts for the desired JRE version in the new project dialog box. To ensure that Eclipse tracks the language differences between versions, also select the desired version in Preferences->Java->Compiler->Compiler compliance level to match your project.
4. Use the 64-bit Cocoa version of Eclipse 3.5.1.

Thanks to http://excitedcuriosity.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/java-1-6-eclipse-on-mac-os-x
OTOH, see http://eclipse.dzone.com/articles/eclipse-galileo-mac-cocoa-or

Win 7 - VMware Fusion - sloww..

[UPDATE] +2G memory later... problem resolved...

My darling little MacBook with VMware Fusion/Windows 7 when intially installed was unconscionably slooow.
I had all the settings on the VM decently set. 1 processor and 1 GB mem for Win 7,
no 3D graphics. Set Win user exeperience to optimize for performance in GUI.

But after installing VMware tools (If you can't figure that out you should be shot in the head because Fusion prompts you about 11000 times to do it.)
...And installing piles of windows updates and rebooting a few times, things seem better.  This makes sense, because windows generally has to load lots of patches after an install.  I have seen windows grind to a halt in if you download the windows updates, and install, but don't reboot. My hunch is that the cause has something to do with memory use.

We'll see....

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Model Name:    MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier:    MacBookPro5,5
  Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed:    2.26 GHz
  Number Of Processors:    1
  Total Number Of Cores:    2
  L2 Cache:    3 MB
  Memory:    2 GB
  Bus Speed:    1.07 GHz

OS X version 10.5.8
build 9l31a

VMware Fusion 2.0.6

Windows 7 Virtual Machine under VMware Fusion

I recently got a new MacBook Pro. I have used various flavors of VMware in the past (VMware workstation under Windows and Linux desktops; VMware Server and ESX 3.5 ; VSphere) - But never  Fusion.
It's pretty darn easy to install. However, the version of VMware fusion I have installed (2.0.6) does not have a virtual machine type for Windows 7  In the past It seems that you can use another VM type with an unsupported OS with good results.. In fact the VMware Team fusion blog recommends using Win 2008 server virtual machine.
Other salient points they suggest:

• Disable 3D Acceleration
• Disable Shared Folders

...Wah, my .iso file was corrupt. See you in 4 hours afer I get another copy. ...two weeks later
Well it turned out that the version of Windows 7 that I was entitled to was an "upgrade" version. And therefore crippled and not bootable. I could have  gone through a whole install of Windows XP, and then upgraded it. But what a waste. But how to make it bootable?

The most straighforward brain-dead way I found is to copy the .iso to a windows machine, and use a program microsoft provides which will make my .iso file into a bootable DVD or USB : http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool .  However, this is an annoying and inelegant solution. All I  really want to do is to graft one little boot loader file into the .iso which is already on my disk. To accomplish this I have to burn my non-bootable iso to a dvd or otherwise copy it to a windows machine, and then burn it to a dvd or bootable usb stick there, and then bring it back.? Wah.

Yikes. I would much rather spend 5 hours learning about how to do this  smarter than spend 1 hour doing something dumb.

Hmm! Boot sectors and bootloaders and .isos oh my!

I got some inspiration from this post:
http://milliamp.org/2009/windows-7-64-bit-on-an-aluminium-macbook-pro/
To look at mkisofs on OS X as the means to slam that boot sector into my existing .iso file.

 Steps:

1. Download mkisofs, from helios: http://www.helios.de/news/news07/mkisofs.phtml
   
2. Open a terminal window (terminal.app) and copy the executable into somewhere in your path (e.g. /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin )
   
3. Find the existing .iso file in finder and double click it to mount it as a file system. 
4. Use mkisofs to create the new .iso file by copying all the files from the mounted .iso file together with the new boot sector file:

mkisofs -v  -hfs-unlock  -N   -U -udf  -no-emul-boot   -no-hfs  -nolimit-pathtables  -ignore-changed-files  -b boot/etfsboot.com -c boot.catalog  --osx-hfs  -iso-level 4 -o /Users/yournamehere/yourshinynewisofile.iso  /Volumes/thenameofoldisofile

not sure that all flags are necessary (e.g. -ignore-changed-files, --osx-hfs, -nolimit-pathtables?). The key discovery was that etfsboot.com is the boot image in /boot on the non-bootable iso, which is written to the boot sector (-b flag) by mkisofs.

And guess what it worked!