Peter's Blog

Could this be the best of both worlds?

Best of Both Worlds

On the left we have kubuntu running under vmware player on Windows Vista. To the right we have Outlook and some Vista widgets running on the Vista host.

Vmware player is incredibly solid and linux installs nicely unlike Microsoft Virtual PC which runs into various problems (which Microsoft aren't rushing to fix). Vmware player is free and I prefer it to Vmware server as I don't need the 'server' element. It's missing features like pause/rewind/snapshot so it is less useful for testing setup programs (cannot roll back to a clean o/s install) but is ok if all you want is a simple desktop os. It supports USB, unlike the free versions of VirtualBox.

I found a site called Easy VMX that allows me to make new virtual machines for vmware player so I can build whatever vm's I like.

Somehow (not sure how) the seamless mouse thing works and I can switch between kubuntu and windows just be moving the mouse. Unfortunately cut and paste between them does not seem to be working.

So why use Vista as the host? Because I'd need another license to run it in a vm on a linux host

I'm giving kubuntu/KDE a try. Compared to gnome it is either more suited to the power user or more bloated, depending on your viewpoint. I think I'm leaning to krusader as a file manager, I could probably run it under gnome but it costs nothing to try KDE.

TBH there's something about the gnome philosophy of cloning windows that irritates me. KDE may have once used 'non free' software but I don't really care.

Good to see the blog works in Konquerer and the text editor has a spell checker! Ironically Konquerer is flagged in red.

Since I got my new work pc with Vista around last october, every night when I shut it down it would try and fail to install an update, this one:

Update for Windows Vista (KB929777)

Installation date: ‎19/‎03/‎2008 08:30

Installation status: Failed

Error details: Code 8000FFFF

Update type: Recommended

Install this update to address an issue in storport.sys which results in a system crash when certain hardware configurations exist. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

More information: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=80411

Help and Support: http://support.microsoft.com

A google revealed that it was because my pc had 4G of memory. There were various hacks to install it but the easiest way was to simply whip out 2G, install the patch, then stick the memory back in. Something I like about the Dell Precision 390 is that you can do this find of thing without touching nasty screwdrivers.

Installing this patch seems to have opened the door to Vista SP1 which the auto upgrade pushed on me. I installed it and the process wasn't so bad. You may want to watch out for the 'reboot now' message as the bulk of the actual installation happens as the pc is shutting down, meaning you can't do anything else. In my case this only took a few minutes, it didn't take an hour as folk on slashdot were moaning.

I can't see any difference for having SP1 except it keeps nagging me to join Microsoft's customer experience program or some such marketing twaddle. Not hassling me would be my first suggestion.

Then again, this pc is a bog standard Dell, no printers, digital camera, scanners, top end video card or whatever to break.

One justification I have for not installing Vista on my home pc is that it is set up for raid 0 and I am not sure that Vista comes with safe drivers for the disk controller, given Vista's notorious lack of drivers. I admit I haven't done any research into this, otherwise my justification might vanish.

On a passing whim I decided to try booting a Knoppix 5.1 CD on it. As is usual with Knoppix it Just Worked ('Just' in the sense of 'merely', rather than 'a moment ago' as it takes a couple of minutes to Just Work). I was able to browse the Raided partition. It ran ok, if sluggishly and at some feeble display resolution: it didn't seem to know about 1920x1200 mode.

I think there used to be a way to hack together a Windows live CD. I'm don't know if it has been figured out for Vista but I'm not sure I care: a knoppix disk can reset passwords but a Vista disk is probably Hamstrung.

Since I have been enjoying using Aptana for Rails development I dicided I wanted to try it's mother project Eclipse for some embedded C work. I downloaded Eclipse as a huge zip file which I unzipped in a directory called c:\eclipse since Vista wouldn't let me put it in c:\Program Files.

I couldn't find any easy installation instructions so I tried running the executable c:\eclipse\eclipse.exe and was told it couldn't find the file c:\eclipse\jre\bin\javaw.exe. I poked around and found a java runtime environment in my aptana install, again in a jre subdirectory. I thought about copying this to the eclipse subdirectory but was shocked to see that it is 80M! A profligate waste of disk space if ever I saw one.

Instead of copying I decided to exploit a new Vista feature: junctions. These are roughly equivalent to unix symbolic links although they aren't exactly the same as Windows has to do everything differently.

I wanted an easy way to create junctions so I downloaded this command line tool from those corporate sellouts at sysinternals. Like all the other sysinternals tools I have used, this was incredibly simple and Just Worked.

C:\eclipse>junction jre "\Program Files\Aptana\Aptana IDE Beta\jre"

Junction v1.05 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer
Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Mark Russinovich
Systems Internals - http://www.sysinternals.com

Created: C:\eclipse\jre
Targetted at: C:\Program Files\Aptana\Aptana IDE Beta\jre

C:\eclipse>

This created a junction called jre in the eclipse directory that pointed to the jre directory in the aptana directory. I tried the eclipse.exe file again and now I was up and running: with the junction eclipse thinks it has it's own copy of the java runtimes to play with but in reality it is using the Aptana copy.

Vista has a new and improved backup facility. This is what Microsoft has to say:

"The file backup feature in Windows Vista is targeted at the core consumer audience. To savvy users, it will appear quite simple, probably too simple for you to use. For most consumers, however, it will hopefully be the right balance of complexity and functionality to get them backing up their files, which is something virtually none of them did in Windows XP, no matter how capable the tool was. For core consumers, we wanted to eliminate the confusion caused by selecting individual folders and files from a long tree of checkboxes, trying to find or guess where other users kept their files, predicting where files would be stored in the future, etc. These choices added too much complexity to the backup process and discouraged users from using NTBackup."

I tried to use it, clicked ok in the UAP box and got this:

I'm not sure where this puts me in the demographics. I'm savvy enough to see that it doesn't look that simple to get it running and as a normal consumer I'd say the available functionality won't get me backing up my files.

If you attempt something like

ipconfig /flushdns

in a command prompt (which surely you all do?) and get the mysterious message

The requested operation requires elevation.

then fret not. Find the command prompt in your start menu (you have it pinned for easy access of course?), right click and select 'Run as Administrator' (you are an administrator?). Then you are free to flush away. 'Begone outdated DNS records' I hear you cry.

Things you can do in Vista: and please don't comment that you could do these in Windows 3.1, I'm not saying you cannot, it's just that I've only just found them in Vista.

Search

I have mentioned before that you can bang the windows button, start typing a search term and press enter and it will run the search. There are a few more useful things it can do:

• Enter the name of a program and it will run the program
• Enter a UNC directory path such as \\server\files and it will open explorer up in that folder
• Enter the name of a popular website such as petersblog.org and it will open said website (if the server is up that is).
• Enter the name of a control panel applet (eg. Services) and it will open: after one of the annoying confirmation dialogs but without having to navigate through the control panel.

You can index files on a network server but you have to download a plugin to do it.

Up a Bit

The Vista Explorers address bar has copied one of my favourite features from servant salamander: the path to a folder is displayed something like:

Program Files > Microsoft > Office > Blah

and you can click on any one of the folders in the path to change to that folder.

I'm still using Salamander...

Favourites

Again in Explorer but also in the File Open/Save dialogs, you can drag and drop folders into the list of favourites on the left. You can't drag them from the address bar though

Virtual PC

I normally use Vmware for SVT but I decided to try Microsoft's VirtualPC for two reasons:

• I wanted to run Vista in a virtual machine and I figured VirtualPC may be more lenient in regards to licences etc (using the licence that came with the PC which I think is ok).
• Vmware has started to annoy me with the ugly way it handles networking.
• Vmware is a fine product, I just feel Microsoft have the inside knowledge to make virtualisation work better, both by hacking Virtual PC AND by hacking Vista.

Anyway, I used the Dell Vista reinstall CD to set up the Virtual Machine and it installed fine. I created an undoable disk so I can test setup programs and then roll the virtual machine back to it's virgin state. Lovely. Never, Ever release a setup program without testing it in a virgin OS installation in a virtual machine.

The Virtual Vista seems quite snappy although it doesn't run Aero and it doesn't seem to support USB devices like vmware does.

More Programs

The way Vista displays 'All Programs' in a silly little list box rather than a pop-out menu is slightly annoying as you are forever scrolling. You can increase the size of the start menu and hence the silly list box in the customisation settings for the start menu (right click taskbar/properties/Start Menu).

Once you've found your program you can always right click it and select 'Pin to Start Menu' so that it appears on the initial Start Menu, in the profuse amount of space you have now given it.

I wanted access to the help facility in Vista for reasons I forget now. I like the integrated search thing and I'm getting into the habit of just pressing the windows button and typing my query. I did this and typed 'help' and enter and what did I get? Windows Help? No. I got something called 'fxri'.

fxri turns out to be an interesting Ruby documentation browser with a built in Ruby Interactive Command Prompt. The documentation browser takes a few seconds to load but gives you very fast keyword filtering on search terms. The documentation displayed is a slightly crude monospaced text display (no hyperlinks) but can't beat the speed of access or the fact that there is a command prompt there to try things out immediately. Crude as it is, I think I prefer it to the approach taken by the web based ruby documentation: Frames? Web 0.5 anybody?

fxri gets the 'fx' part of its name from a gui package called Fox that may be worth investigating one day.

I must try typing more random words into the search and seeing what goodies I can find.

One other Vista note, it seems as if Microsoft are trying to disguise the annoyingly long time it takes for Windows to shut down by claiming to install an update every time.

Must say I'm still liking Vista, but still not enough to pay to upgrade my home pc's.