HP ProBook 4540s

Guess why I bought this particular model?

Of course I like keyboard, very Apple-like, and the mat screen and further the ease of accessing the HDD and other stuff. However, the main motivator was, that it was the successor of the ProBook 4530s, which, allegedly, is the best laptop computer to be OS-Xed.
I tried the traditional route, i.e. SnowLeopard DVD, and the further steps. I got as far as Lion, and than things stopped working out. Finally, I sort of gave up, installed a linux on the laptop and was happy!

Just lately, something told me go give it a try again. Potentially it was the availability of the latest Probook installer 6.1.11, which motivated the second attempt.
All data securely put on an external disk, I tried my luck. Now, my HP Probook 4540s (Sandy Bridge) is happily running OS-X 10.8.5. Even the dared first TM-backup went straight through.

You may ask, why I am not trying to install Mavericks (OS-X 10.9.1) on the laptop. Well, first of all, I like Mountain Lion in a way. And yes, I was tempted by the fact that 10.9.x seems to incorporate power-handling more deeply. Hence, I tried to boot 10.9.1, but it failed in the first attempt... so I just decided to leave things as they were.

We'll see what the future has in house for the last laptop member of the Sandy Bridge family.

BTW, in order to get WiFi, I exchanged the laptops WiFi-card to one that is supported by OS-X genuinely. This set me back by about €8.-

When I bought it, the ProBook 4540s cost me about €600,- and came with MS Virus7. I replaced the 320GB HDD with a 1TB WD blue (which was about another €100.- at the time).

All in all, I am really glad to have bought this computer. It served me fine under Linux and it seems to be doing a great job with OS-X right now.

Tablet on a Hackintosh

The good old times, where it was clear what was a tablet, when speaking about computers. Today, there is a good confusion of what a tablet is. Well, this post is not about iOS or Android devices, this is about the input device called a tablet, or graphics tablet to be precise.

There was a certain hype, well before touch-screens, to use tablets in particular in drawing applications and CAD. There was a time, when those things were really cheap. On a windows PC, or Linux respectively, the cheap tablets work just fine OOB, w/o any additional worries.

However, the world is different on a Mac. Those things are not just working on a Mac at all. Still, there is hope!
Have a look at hyperpen-for-apple. This solved it all for me.

There are some issues however...
- First of all, the zip-file would not be unzipped by the Archive-tool. "unzip" (in a terminal window) works fine, however it spills the content in the directory you are calling unzip from.
- Secondly, whenever you want to use you tablet, you have to call the "hyperpenDaemon" manually; remember to execute this program indicating your very own screen resolution. I wrote a tiny shell script, so that I do not have to remember the parameters.

Up to now, I have not yet started using my tablet. The idea was to use it with the GIMP, post-processing my photos (cf. my photo-blog).