Mac PCs and scanner software

[ka3jjz]

The question about how to run Windoze scanner software using a Mac has come up often enough that it warrants a wiki article. This would be something that would likely be somewhat technical in nature, so the person writing this would be someone who is very conversant with the technology. Details count!

Whoever writes this would likely also need to detail how to set up each environment (VMWare, Parallels, ect.) and how to overcome the serial-USB question. It would also be helpful to have as many different software scanner packages documented as possible. Obviously this would be a multi-person effort.

It's a great topic for discussion, and deserves a great deal of development. Any takers?

best regards..Mike

 

[loumaag]

Mike,

Although I certainly can be helpful, I really don't have the time to start the project.

I might add, that it is not really that difficult to get this up & running. If you can get one of the virtual machines to work on your iMac or MacBook then the guest OS (WIndows for example) runs just as if it was running natively. I am not sure that the problems involved in getting the VM to work belong here but maybe.

Once the VM is working, basically the only problems you might encounter deal with are either trying to store files on the Mac side (as opposed to the vm drive) or those problems one would encounter in any case (driver problems vs hardware compatibility) even if you were running it on a PC. For example, I have a TrippLite USB->Serial Adapter (U209-000-R) that runs just fine under the Windows7 environment that operates under the Parallels VM, but my Mac doesn't recognize it as a serial port, this is because TrippLite doesn't have, nor apparently cares to write, a driver package for the Intel based Macs, but since Windows7 recognizes it from the "get-go", it operates just fine for all my radio needs.

 

[Astrak]

It's fairly simple really, purchase Windows 7. Reformat hard drive when Windows asks and install

 

[ka3jjz]

You touched on some of the topics that would need to be covered Lou. Driver issues are a biggie, particularly for those that are moving to Mac for the first time.

You also mentioned installing the VM - while that in and of itself might not belong here, any issues working under Windoze software while working inside the VM certainly do. For example, if FreeScan can't store files in a default directory because it's working under Parallels, and you found a way to solve it, that certainly deserves documenting.

And where would you go to get a copy of Win XP or Win7 that you could install (I would expect this would be the Microshaft website, but who knows...)? Stuff like this can be documented too

Think like someone who has never done this before at all, and all sorts of questions pop up. Even just documenting the difficulties is a valuable first step. Other folks can then (hopefully) jump in and say how they fixed them, if it can be done at all. 73 Mike

 

[bfanshier]

I don't think I've got enough knowledge to write an entire wiki article, but I will share my experiences and answer any questions that I can. As for what I've seen so far, the current version of Parallels (6.0.12092) installed on my 17" MacBook Pro (2.66GHz Corei7 w/8GB RAM) without any problems and runs great. I'm running the 64-bit Windows 7 Pro. My scanner software is Butel's ARC-XT Pro, and my USB to Serial Adapter is the Prolific PL2303, which I picked up at BestBuy for about $30 and came with drivers for both Windows and Mac. Parallels even does a nice job of asking me which environment I want to connect it to (Mac or PC) when I plug it in.

As far as Parallels goes, there are a few options to select when you're setting things up for the first time, but they are clearly explained during the setup process. In a nutshell, it goes like this. (1) Purchase a copy of Parallels Desktop, and a copy of WIndows 7 from any software reseller. (2) Insert the Parallels media and run the installer. (3) Insert the Windows media and from within the Parallels application, select "New virtual Machine" from the file menu. Parallels will set up the virtual machine, create a virtual hard drive, and install Windows. You can have as many VMs as you have hard drive space for, and you can create a clean "Master" install of your Windows machine, and then work from a copy if you're worried about messing something up.

I'm very pleased with the results of this setup so far - I'm using it with a BCD 396XT and a 996XT, and have not had any problems at all. I plan to add a BCT15X to the mix very soon.

 

[AK9R]

You also mentioned installing the VM - while that in and of itself might not belong here...

Actually, I think that approach might be very useful. While there are probably resources available on the Internet to help someone run general purpose Windows programs on a Mac, radio hobbyists have some specific needs especially when it comes to interfacing to external equipment.

Frankly, I'm a bit stunned that a Windows program running in a VM on a Mac can see a USB to serial adapter with a Windows driver. Maybe there is hope for the world.

 

[ka3jjz]

I don't think I've got enough knowledge to write an entire wiki article, but I will share my experiences and answer any questions that I can. As for what I've seen so far, the current version of Parallels (6.0.12092) installed on my 17" MacBook Pro (2.66GHz Corei7 w/8GB RAM) without any problems and runs great. I'm running the 64-bit Windows 7 Pro. My scanner software is Butel's ARC-XT Pro, and my USB to Serial Adapter is the Prolific PL2303, which I picked up at BestBuy for about $30 and came with drivers for both Windows and Mac. Parallels even does a nice job of asking me which environment I want to connect it to (Mac or PC) when I plug it in.

As far as Parallels goes, there are a few options to select when you're setting things up for the first time, but they are clearly explained during the setup process. In a nutshell, it goes like this. (1) Purchase a copy of Parallels Desktop, and a copy of WIndows 7 from any software reseller. (2) Insert the Parallels media and run the installer. (3) Insert the Windows media and from within the Parallels application, select "New virtual Machine" from the file menu. Parallels will set up the virtual machine, create a virtual hard drive, and install Windows. You can have as many VMs as you have hard drive space for, and you can create a clean "Master" install of your Windows machine, and then work from a copy if you're worried about messing something up.

I'm very pleased with the results of this setup so far - I'm using it with a BCD 396XT and a 996XT, and have not had any problems at all. I plan to add a BCT15X to the mix very soon.

You've touched nicely on a good start of topics here. You could write this up in Word and I can easily transfer it into the MediaWiki language format - and that goes for anyone else that decides to tackle this little - maybe not so little - project.

A couple of things stand out. The biggest one is that you found a US-serial converter that has drivers for both Mac and Windows. As it uses the Prolific PL2303 chipset, that's even better. A make/SKU number would put a bow on this ribbon, but it's exactly the kind of thing that needs to be documented.

I realize you were trying to be brief about how to install Parallels. As the options for installation are explained already, I doubt that it would be profitable to repeat them. However, any tweaks that you found you needed to do that were not explained should also be documented. Perhaps the tweaks had to do with setting up the environment that Win7 would sit in (for example, how much disk space/memory did you allocate, if you had to do that manually?). If someone were to set up WinXP instead, would that amount change (I would think it would). What about other versions of Win7?

Were there any problems with running ARC-XT? In saving profiles? Anything you had to do differently than if you had installed in a native Windows environment? How about virtual control (which I have read in the past was something of an issue, at least with some software)? Did you fix that, and if so, specifically how?

This is a good start - it opens up quite a number of questions and hopefully answers. Think of how useful something like this would be to a newcomer that doesn't know anything at all about setting up a scanner package inside of a Mac environment. Clearly there is a LOT of documenting here to be done

best regards..Mike

 

[bfanshier]

USB To Serial Adapter

Well, here's the info on the adapter.
Dynex™ 16" USB PDA/Serial Adapter Cable Model: DX-UBDB9.
Here's a link to the manufacturer's page - Dynex™ 16" USB PDA/Serial Adapter Cable : Dynex

BestBuy's SKU: 7135664

 

[loumaag]

Let me add a few things in reference to those already said just to increase the knowledge base on this.

If you use Parallels, after getting your copy of Windows installed, make sure you let (or instruct) Parallels to install the "System Tools." These are various internal Parallels utilities that make your life simple and allow some things to happen that are beneficial to you especially in regard to disk drives and sharing, see my comments about data storage later.

The one thing I have found about Parallels is there is a tendency for it to continue to grow the VM hard drive if you take the default settings when installing, even if it is not necessary. So, when choosing the amount of disk space to allocate to the guest VM, make sure to indicate to Parallels that you don't want it to dynamically grow as needed. In my case, the 60 GB virtual HD I started with grew to 127 GB over a 16 month period while I was scratching my head over why I was running low on disk space (in the Mac). Reducing this back to my original 60 GB was possible without starting over, but it was tedious and time consuming.

Another point that Mike brought up is where do you store the data for FreeScan? Since most of the software that we use as scanner hobbyists allow us to point the target of this data storage to almost any directory (folder), including network drives, storing on the Mac side of the system is the smart way to go. The root drive of the current user (Mac side) can be found in the Windows Explorer as "Home on 'psf'", on my VM that would be Drive Y:. Save yourself some headaches and build a folder under Documents (on the Mac side) for data storage for your software needs, this is because not all folders on the Mac side are treated equally by Parallels when it comes to sharing. So, for example, in my case data for FreeScan can be found in "Y:\Documents\Data\FreeScan\".

ETA: Oh, and I have not yet experienced any virtual control issues in this enviornment, but I don't use them for the most part and cannot speak to all packages. YMMV

 

[h8tdigitalradio]

Hello,

I use VMWare Fusion 3 and Bootcamp with Win7 32 Bit. No issues. Each USB to Serial Dongle installed on my MBP has Mac OS and Windows Drivers Installed. The USB cables for Uniden and GRE Scanners (Prolific/FTDI) have Mac Drivers. The VM will ask if you want to use the cable on the Mac or Windows side.

I usually save the files to the Windows side when using VM. I use Uniden/WinXX/PSRXXX/ARC Software. No crashes. I can't believe how well Windows runs on a Mac. IIRC, NTFS-3G allows you to save NTFS Files to Mac OS and can be read.


73

Dave L.

 

[bfanshier]

Parallels Expanding Disk issues?

Lou - did you contact Parallels support about the expanding disk problem? Did they have anything helpful to say about it? I just checked mine, and my 64GB expanding disk is taking up about 25GB of space on my drive, and I've been running it for about 9 month. I'm guessing that to shrink yours down it took more than just clicking the "Compress" button in the Hard Disk tab un the hardware control panel...? Mine claims that it will free up 3GB of space for me if I compress right now. So maybe I've been lucky up until now, but was curious how I or others might avoid this problem. The "Expanding Disk" option, in theory, seems to be the right one since it doesn't carve out a bunch of un-needed space, but if there's a bug in their code then we'd all be wise to avoid it.

 

[loumaag]

Lou - did you contact Parallels support about the expanding disk problem? Did they have anything helpful to say about it?

I did not; however, there are several mentions of this disk size creep in the support/customer forums.

I just checked mine, and my 64GB expanding disk is taking up about 25GB of space on my drive, and I've been running it for about 9 month. I'm guessing that to shrink yours down it took more than just clicking the "Compress" button in the Hard Disk tab un the hardware control panel...?

You are correct, I did not compress the HD, and to be frank, am not a fan of compressing files.

Mine claims that it will free up 3GB of space for me if I compress right now. So maybe I've been lucky up until now, but was curious how I or others might avoid this problem. The "Expanding Disk" option, in theory, seems to be the right one since it doesn't carve out a bunch of un-needed space, but if there's a bug in their code then we'd all be wise to avoid it.

What I did was edit the disk from "Expanding disk 64 GB" just like yours appears to be, to "Plain disk 64 GB". To do that you have to delete (through Parallels) all snapshots, a task that took Parallels about 4 hours, and then change the HD configuration. The change, which Parallels handled quite nicely on its own did take a while (over night) in my case but the tedium I referred to was in finding out the problem and searching for solutions before ever doing it. That was over a day's worth of looking, but now you know it for the time it took to read this post.

As you say, the expanding disk would seem to be the appropriate answer, but I think that the problem is once it expands it never shrinks again. And I was using the Windows environment with Photoshop Essentials (vers 6 & 8); it has the problem of if you edit a file (including just adding key tags) to a picture, it copies the file and "trashes" the original. Things 'trashed" in Windows stay in the Windows recycle bin on the VM HD until you empty it. So, PSE probably ran my recycle bin up to expanding the HD.

In any case, giving Windows 7 a 64GB HD for OS and local storage didn't seem to be excessive and I currently have ~ 19 GB free on the Windows C drive.

 

[ka3jjz]

This is precisely the kind of stuff that belongs in the wiki article. Good stuff here! Now if it can be assembled in a logical progression, newcomers would have a pretty detailed guide.

As mentioned before if someone were to put all this in a Word document and send it to me, I can convert it to MediaWiki and build an article around it. With the number of times we get questions about Macs running a popular package (pick one - ARC XT, FreeScan, etc.) this kind of detail would be worth its weight in gold

Nicely done gents best regards..Mike

 

[jcpd9720]

You get a more stable platform, no need for support, and virtually no security issues, ever... Come to the dark side so you don't have to jump through hoops to play with your scanner!

J/K guys!

I would actually read the heck out of the wiki on that as it would lead to a lot of helpful information if I was decided to run my software in virtual machine.

 

[Astrak]

You get a more stable platform, no need for support, and virtually no security issues, ever... Come to the dark side so you don't have to jump through hoops to play with your scanner!

J/K guys!

I would actually read the heck out of the wiki on that as it would lead to a lot of helpful information if I was decided to run my software in virtual machine.

Wait a second, I thought you guys were the rebels aka the non dark side?