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Why is it that I always find myself ponying up the small amounts of cash it takes to purchase Mac shareware applications? Black fire and a disco ball? I gotta have it.
Today I fell victim to MacZot’s current promotion (ends in 23 hours!) that saw me gobbling up the public beta of the Disco CD/DVD burning application for Mac OS X, and boy am I content with this lil 700KB number.
Firstly, the hype: when you purchase the beta at the silly-low price, you also get the opportunity to send a free license to someone else. So here goes - the first person to leave an intelligent comment gets the license! (I’ll need a real email address) This is a great marketing idea that see people not only using the beta of a terrifically designed piece of software, but also spreading the word to others so they can try it as well. Good show.
Next, the features: Disco copies discs in two clicks. Say that ten times fast. Disco can span CDs and DVDs automagically. They call it Spandex, I call it dead sexy. This is extremely handy when backing up iPhoto or iTunes, trust me. Disco can burn VIDEO_TS folders by just dragging them onto the application, which makes it great for burning your DVD backups. Disco has realtime 3D interactive smoke that actually wafts up from the application as you burn discs. If you blow into your microphone, the smoke will dissipate, and if you move your cursor around the smoke itself, it reportedly moves accordingly - but I didn’t get to see this on the low-end test box. Disco has an amazingly simplistic interface that is very easy to follow as it prompts you at every step. Last, but certainly not the least in terms of features, and should really be in caps: Disco remembers every single burn and keeps a catalog of the burn sessions using what it calls “discography” so that you can easily do things like print labels, disk jackets, or simply keep handy for when you need that dot release or the pre-altered code that you can never find. Let Disco be your personal sherpa.
Disco runs very well for a beta application. I have yet to see it crash under Panther, Tiger, or even Leopard (WWDC or the 9a ADC build). Oh, and it worked fine in Tiger server as well. Unfortunately the test box is a 1st generation Mac Mini (PPC), so there was no “smoke” to speak of (anyone have screenshots?), so that will need to be tested later. I burned some mix audio CDs, a backup copy of the disk image for Disco public beta itself, an ISO image of Ubuntu Edgy Eft Beta, and a bunch of Gentoo releases, for good measure. No hiccups. I erased a very old scratched CDRW. I even inserted a scratched blank CDR to see what would happen… Well it wouldn’t burn correctly but Disco kept on keepin’ on - like some sort of Disco inferno - no bouncing beachballs of death here. And you call this a beta? I expected flames, not smoke. No crash and burn here.
In these screenshots you see the Disco app in full swing, from installation to a test burn, and a view of all the windows it provides. I really like the design of this app, and it was well worth the 15$ pricetag. If you’re new to MacZot, and need a referrer, feel free to use “blandname”. Now go write some optical media and dance around like a schoolgirl.
Oh and on the topic of Disco, and in the name of Halloween here’s a joke:
“Why didn’t the skeleton dance at the disco?”
“He had no body to dance with”
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I’ve introduced this before but I got off to a really bad start and I appologize. So here’s the follow-up. Not only is Edgy Eft 2 quite stable, it also installs just fine on a Mac Mini, it simply doesn’t recognize the Apple Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard yet. You can easily get the install running using a USB keyboard, however, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Edgy Eft Knot 2 is the newest release from Ubuntu, and is compatible with the budget Mac Mini G4s. Ubuntu 6.10 supports wireless on the mini as well as sound! OK now that we have you hooked let’s get started, shall we?
Step 1 - Grab the release
You’ll want to either download the CD image or start scraping the torrent (in my case the torrent was faster but YMMV)
Once you have the ISO, verify the MD5 sum in order to make sure it’s OK. If you used bittorrent, you should be fine as it will calculate the hash as you go.
Step 2 - Burn the CD Image
This part is pretty easy, but if you run into trouble Ubuntu actually has a fantastic guide to burning CD images - it comes highly recommended.
Step 3 - Start the installation
This part is pretty simple if you have Macintosh keyboard. Other keyboards can be problematic. To boot from CD using an Apple keyboard, just hold “C”. If this doesn’t work, and you downloaded the ISO but didn’t verify the MD5 sum, chances are you have a bad download or a bad burn (or both). You’ll want to verify the MD5 sum now! If it passes we know we have a bad burn - so burn it again. Of course if the MD5 sum failed, you’ll want to download again - I’d recommend using bittorrent of course.
Step 4 - Post Install
The install is actually pretty easy and straight forward but we’ll need to tweak a few things in order to get what we want out of this version of Ubuntu. After all, we want wireless right? (By the way - sound should work just like the liveCD, as well as previous versions of PPC Ubuntu) Follow the screenshots below which shothe whole procedure. I’ll be making a slideshow soon - subscribe to RSS and it’ll come.
Gallery:
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Firstly, grab all of the image files from Sun
You’ll need a Sun ID, and you don’t need to use the Java download helper, but if you’re on a slow connection it will certainly help (if anything, it helps by queuing your downloads).
Once all of the files have been downloaded, you will need to extract them. I use WinRAR to do this, but the choice is yours.
Navigate to the folder you have downloaded the files to. Select all of the files, either by dragging a selection box, or by ctrl-clicking, or shift-clicking. Right-click, then click on “extract files here”. Wait a while (this is a full DVD image).
Once this process has completed we will need to concatenate the files together.
The next step is not required, but I find it will help with everyday computing as well so I have included it.
You’ll need to somehow run a command in the folder that you have all of the Solaris files in. I use the Microsoft PowerToy to do that. Download and install it.
(Or you can use many other ways to do the same thing if you wish - the choice is yours)
Then find the folder you have downloaded the files to and right-click it. You will be offered the option to “Run Program” from the context menu. Click that button and paste the following into the resulting window.
copy /b
"sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-a"
+"sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-b"
+"sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-c"
+"sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-d"
+"sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-e"
sol-10-GA-x86-dvd.iso
you’ll see (if your files are on the drive “D” and you use Windows XP):
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
D:\sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-a
D:\sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-b
D:\sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-c
D:\sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-d
D:\sol-10-u1-ga-x86-dvd-iso-e
1 file(s) copied.
Voila! You can now burn the image using free software like IMGBurn, or commercial such as Nero, Roxio EasyCD, or Cheetah.
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