Mike Southby

I have been asked by a few people how to make a goldcard using a Mac, but as I do not have access to one at the moment I have not been able to produce a guide however thanks to Johnny and some research using Google you’ll be pleased to know that I have now produced a guide.

Caveat:  I have not been able to test this myself as currently I do not have a Mac to test with; however I have read various comments confirming that this method works.  Please post a comment to let me know how you get on.

PLEASE backup the entire contents of your microSD before proceeding, in one of the first steps you’ll need to reformat.  I will not be accountable for anyone neglecting to do this and loosing data – you have been warned!

So, to create a goldcard using Mac OSX, simple do the following:

• Backup the data on your microSD
• Click Menu on your mobile
• Go to Settings and then SD & Phone Storage
• Click Unmount SD card
• Click Format SD card

We now need to know the microSD cards CID number, using this method; we can find it by going to the market and downloading ASTRO File Manager.  Once you have downloaded and installed it, do the following:

• Open ASTRO File Manager
• Navigate to sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:82d1 (you’ll find that 82d1 will be different on your device)
• Long press on the CID file
• Select Open As and then Text
• Select File Editor
• You’ll be given a long number, make a note of this

Next we need this long number in order to create your goldcard image; this can be done by using a simple tool found on this page:

• Copy the number carefully into the data field and hit Submit
• Make a note of the new number

Next to create the actual goldcard image by going to this page:

• Enter the number from above into the SD Card Serial (CID) field
• Enter the other details and hit Generate Goldcard
• Check your email and save the attached goldcard image file to your user directory

Connect your Desire to your Mac and do the following:

• Pull down the notification bar and press Charge Only (if you have previously changed the default option this may be different, i.e. HTC Sync)
• Select the Disk Drive option and hit Done
• On your Mac, open Terminal which can be found by clicking through Applications>Utilities>Terminal (or your Linux Terminal)
• Type the following:
  diskutil list
• You should be able to see your microSD card; you can recognise it from its size and by the fact that its type is DOS_FAT_32.  You need to make a note of the Identifier for example disk2s1
• Now you need to unmount the microSD, assuming your Identifier was disk2s1 (change the value ‘2’  based on the number you got after the word ‘disk’) enter the following:
  diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

Finally, to create your individual goldcard do the following:

• Open Terminal once again and type the following:
  sudo dd bs=512 if=~/goldcard.img of=/dev/disk2
  (remembering to change the ‘2’ if appropriate)
• You’ll need to enter your password when prompted (or if using Linux, the password for root)

That’s it, goldcard created!

I’ve recently been using one of my machines in a dual-boot configuration running Windows 7 Ultimate alongside the latest Ubuntu LTS distribution, although decided that I wanted to revert it back into a dedicated Windows machine and ‘reclaim’ the disk space being utilised by Linux.

Of course there are a few ways of doing this; I’d normally only run a dual boot configuration on a test machine so wouldn’t be too perturbed by having to rebuild and start over, but this machine already had a lot of data and customisation and I didn’t want to start again and rebuild from the OS up.  So how else do you set about removing Linux and GRUB?  Well, the answer is actually quite simple.

Caveat:  I cannot stress the importance of ensuring you have a full backup of all the data on the machine before proceeding.  If you don’t have one, stop now.

Before going any further, you’ll need to dig out your original Windows 7 installation media as you’ll need this in the following steps, then once you are ready do the following:

• Restart your machine and enter the BIOS
• Somewhere in the BIOS menu you’ll find a setting to change the boot order of your machine, enter this and ensure that you have the DVD drive set at the top of the boot order
• Enter your Windows 7 DVD into the drive and restart
• Press any key on your keyboard when prompted to enter setup
• Select the appropriate language, time, currency and keyboard layout and click Next
• Click Repair your computer
• Click the option highlighting the operating system that you want to repair, in my case Windows 7 and then click Next
• On the following screen, System Recovery Options, click Command Prompt
• Once the command prompt opens on your screen type the following followed by Enter:
  Bootrec.exe /FixMbr
• You should now see ‘operation completed successfully’
• Restart your machine and enter the BIOS once again to change the boot order back to its original setting
• Now, restart your machine and you should notice that GRUB has been replaced with the stock windows boot loader and Windows starts to load without prompt
• Once back in the GUI, right click My Computer followed by Manage and Disk Management
• Right click the Linux partitions and remove them (simplified, you will have to click a few buttons here to acknowledge the steps)
• Right click the Windows partition and extend it into the space created by removing the Linux partitions (again simplified, just acknowledge the prompts as they appear)
• Job done

You should now find that GRUB and Linux are no more and you have a dedicated Windows machine once again, the whole process should take no more than around 5 minutes; far preferable to the hours it would have taken to rebuild the machine from scratch.

Note: the same method also applies for other distributions of Linux

A fairly common issue within Ubuntu after installing and configuring Compiz is that your titlebars disappear leaving you with an unsightly workspace and in some instances, the inability to close windows and applications.  The problem seems to affect mostly systems with an NVidia GPU and in my case, occurred after switching to a higher resolution on my second monitor.  The fix is thankfully, simple:

• Open a terminal window and type:
  sudo su
  followed by your password when prompted and then:
  gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• Once gedit opens scroll down to the ‘Device’ section and just before ‘EndSection’ add the following:
  Option “AddARGBVisuals” “True”
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
• Save the file
• Restart Ubuntu

You should now find that all of the titlebars return and life is good again.  The above method should work for all recent releases, I’m using 10.04 Lucid.

As promised, an update on where I am at with trying to get a working installation of Microsoft Office 2010 on Ubuntu.

After numerous hours spent trying various options and configurations of WINE I’m still unable to get it working.  Sure, I can get it to install but it won’t run so I can’t really call it a success.  I’ll have some time over the Christmas break so will keep trying and hopefully will have a stable solution soon; these things have a habit of ‘falling into place’ and the answer is usually staring me in the face!

My original post showing how to install Office 2007 can be found here – http://www.mikesouthby.co.uk/2009/11/ubuntu-9-10-installing-microsoft-office-2007