Category: Technology

Fortunately, Hacintoshing has gotten easier through the years due to the hard work of a lot of people on tools and procedures. So it only took a few days to get my Dell Latitudes E5470 and E5570 working with MacOS Catalina. But since it was still a bit of a challenge, I wanted to write up my procedure. I’m sure I’ll be doing this again at some point and it may help out others. And with Big Sur around the corner, I may try to do all this again when Big Sur is released.

As usual, I made this harder on myself by wanting to do a triple-boot option with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal. Fortunately, again, this process has gotten easier and just works better now than it has before. For the majority of people who won’t be doing a triple-boot scenario, the sections below are labeled with what is in them so you can do only what applies to your install. Although if you won’t be installing MacOS at all, then you should skip this guide since it relies on the Clover bootloader which is unnecessary if you are going to just use Ubuntu and Windows.

After getting GalliumOS installed on a Chromebook, here’s what I did to install Minecraft on it including transferring the saved “worlds” from a prior Windows computer. And below I have a link to improve performance.

Student Chromebooks are “Managed” by the schools so they won’t allow “Linux (Beta)” to run on them. That’s a logical policy for Google to restrict it and as I discovered isn’t even something that a school can change if they wanted. But it means that you can’t do things like run Minecraft on a Chromebook that is Managed. That’s too bad since I really don’t want to get extra hardware for the sake of Minecraft.

But I discovered that you can install GalliumOS on a Chromebook to dual boot it and then you can run Minecraft in GalliumOS. This post will cover the set up of the Chromebook to dual boot ChromeOS and GalliumOS. A subsequent post will cover the specific Minecraft install and post-install steps. I did it on a Dell 11 3189 but it should work on most modern Chromebooks. The steps look long but it actually didn’t take too long to do and the process seems pretty solid.

For privacy reasons, I’m not going to talk a lot about the background here. So I’ll just state that there are two Chromebooks (Dell 11 3189) in my household and that it turned out the local school system had acquired one of them – not physically, but functionally. I learned a lot about Chromebooks, ChromeOS, “Managed” devices and “Owned” devices that I wanted to document for myself and for anyone else that might benefit.

I wanted to set up a Minecraft server (there’s not as much activity this summer due to the pandemic) but I know very little about it. So I did some quick research, found some guides that seemed to look like they would work, and dove right in. Mostly this post is for me to remember which guides I followed. There were lots of possible ways to do it but the ones listed here happen to be the ones I followed.

My MythTV setup has been humming along for years now. It still beats what you can get from cable companies primarily because of the commercial skip capabilities. But there’s also other good stuff like being able to archive a recording. I have previously moved copies of recorded TV to an SD card for portable viewing, for example. For years, I’ve wanted an easy way to make a recorded TV show leave the ephemeral recordings section and move to the video library for permanent storage. Today, I finally got that to happen.

I had a set of Firefox windows and tabs open on my Windows 7 laptop.  I was in the middle of one thing when I started an unrelated effort to rebuilt a secondary disk to allow the laptop to boot MacOs and Ubuntu.  I knew I wanted to preserve the session of Firefox windows for my other effort so I was using Chrome to keep the two projects separate.  Somewhere in there, I installed new software which automatically opened Firefox and then I rebooted effectively killing off my ability to use Restore Previous Session from the Firefox menu.  But I wasn’t ready to be done with those tabs!  So I dug around in the Firefox folders and figured out how to restore the session I wanted.  Here’s what to do if it happens to you in the latest version of Firefox.

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I successfully installed MacOS on my Dell Latitude E6430.  With that complete, I wanted to make an DVD archive of the USB drive I used as the installer.  I have DVD archives of my past hacintosh installations and to keep up the library and to keep the permanent backup, I wanted one for this install too.  This task proved to be impossible and impractical and good golly I wasted a lot of time on it.  But since I learned a lot on the way, I needed to write it up.  I’ll forget it if I don’t and some of the lessons learned can be useful for the future.  Primarily for me, but perhaps for somebody else too.

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