How to set up Star XENTRY DAS on Macbook Air


This is a user experience of running the entire suite of - sd connect c4 software XENTRY / DAS on a Macbook air.

“I have an unused Airbook from 2010 running snow leopard as op sys and equipped as usual with a 112 GB solid state disc, a WIFI and one USB port to the external world. Of course, it is based on the Intel platform.As I love these light and beautifully designed machines, I was thinking about using it for something else then letting it accumulate dust in a drawer. DAS/Xentry came to mind and I spent a weekend to get it up and running.
I needed three attempts:

First attempt: Update of the machine to the new mountain lion op sys. Then I ran Bootcamp to partition the disc into 40Gb for the Mac and approx70 Gb for Windows. I used Refit to get a comfortable dual boot manager. During installation I realised that the newest version of Bootcamp (part of mountain lion) only supports Win7 and upwards. Thus I continued with Win7 and as the effort to get Xentry running under Win7 was too big and I progressed too slowly, I experimented with Win7 and VMWare running Xentry in a virtual XP machine. This turned out to be too slow for my taste but it is probably a reasonable option for a more powerful Mcbook Pro. Someone in the forum has a similar thing with Xentry/DAS 11/2012 but on win xp thru Parallels desktop on my Macbook Pro and had same error HHTwin.ini but carried on. Then successfully installing WIS 11/2012 and EPC 8/2012 without any problems. And it’s said that his DAS worked well with w202 cdi220 by SD connect c4 (lan connection).

Second attempt: I loaded the older snow leopard as op sys because its Bootcamp version supports Win XP. I made a dual boot with XP, using Refit again, and started to install DAS/Xentry. I encountered limitations by the single USB port and worked around with an external USB-Hub to have an external DVD drive, a dual button mouse (more comfortable to use under XP than the trackpad) and a USB stick connected at the same time. Problem here was that the USB port was somehow overloaded and hung up twice. I abandoned this as well and applied the big gun.

Third attempt: I went for a XP-only installation, applied the special Mac drivers after the first boot into XP and installed DAS/Xentry 11.2012 (the only offline programming version without issues) according to the SKdrasher script but with some modifications.
Like in my PC installations I skipped his step 6 (VBoxService installation). On a PC, I always get two error messages while installing the first of the two DVD's. The first one (no .....getspdir file or similar text) I ignore and a bit later another error would come up saying '...cannot create .../../HHTwin.ini file'. Before acknowledging this error I create a HHTWin dir at the location given in the error message and then I 'yes' to continue the installation. Maybe this is known to experts, I figured it out by coincidence. Without creating the HHTWin, the installation process automatically installs Xentry as well. Creating the subdir, the installation follows exactly the skdrasher script and needs the extra step for Xentry installation.

Now I have a very stylish and compact machine when I work around my cars. Next weekend I will install EPC (electronic parts catalogue) and SD media.”