Our good friend Bertrand Guihéneuf, former Apple employee, and the man responsible for iCal, has ported a UniBin version of the Desktop Manager 0.6 Snapshot from SVN, along with a fixed version of the mach_inject function (He is actually the person responsible for porting mach_inject to Intel as well...). It works very well and has a new look and new functionality. It is however, still not complete as far as I know. Give it a go if you would like a great, stable virtual desktop app.

Desktop Manager 0.6 Universal Binary (It says it is 0.5.3, but the app is really version 0.6)

P.S.

For anyone running 10.4.4 or above:

Important restriction: In 10.4.4 (intel build), Apple removed the ability to send low-level mach commands from one task to another.

A task trying to control another one must now be root or belong to the procmod group.

If you want to allow mach_inject to work again for your account, you need to add yourself to the procmod group.

Another option is to enable it to work for all accounts on the system, by changing the security policy for task_for_pid().

Please understand that both options re-open what some consider as a security risk.


Enabling mach_inject for your account

One way to do it is to execute the following command in a terminal:

CODE

sudo niutil -appendprop "/" "/groups/procmod" "users" `id -un`

Unfortunately, group modifications are not taken into account immediately. You have to wait one minute or two before the kernel realizes you now belong to procmod (yes, memberd -r normally resets the cache, but the kernel seems to maintain it’s own cache). Obviously, rebooting your computer will empty kernel cache.

To remove yourself from procmod group, use the inverse command:

CODE

sudo niutil -destroyval "/" "/groups/procmod" "users" `id -un`

To check who is in the procmod group, use the following command:

CODE

sudo niutil -readprop "/" "/groups/procmod" "users"

Enabling mach_inject for all accounts

You can do this by changing the security policy for task_for_pid():

CODE

sudo sysctl -w kern.tfp.policy=1

You can disable mach_inject back with :

CODE

sudo sysctl -w kern.tfp.policy