Windows 7 fail

I downloaded the Release Candidate of Windows 7 earlier this year, and today I decided to give it a try. After booting from the dvd and asking a couple of questions it asks for a cd rom driver(!). What did you say, Microsoft? You are booting from that CD rom drive. You also have a whole DVD to store whatever drivers you need. Every major linux distro I've tried manages include drivers for my cd rom on a CD! Of course, like every other Windows installation it stops more than one time. And of course it doesn't boot into live cd mode before start asking questions, but that is hardly anything new for anybody who has installed Windows more than a couple of times.

Update 2010-06-13: Finally managed to get some trial running on my laptop, and have used Windows 7 for a couple of weeks on my laptop. It behaves a lot better on my three year old laptop than Windows XP ever did, but I don|t know if this is because of Windows 7, or because it doesn|t contain hp drivers.

What does "cd -" mean?

I didn't know until I read the free ebook "Linux 101 Hacks.

(It lets you change between the two last directories.)

Oh, -the book is really free. At least I found the password at the web site without registering my email address.

Making a screencast from Ubuntu 8.10

(Hopefully I'll get back to this post with more details later. Bug me if I've left out something important.) I've been planning to make a couple of Norwegian Linux screencasts for some time, and yesterday night i sat for several hours to try to figure out the best way to do it. After figuring out most details I guess there is enough stuff interesting details to make a new blog post.

First attempts: Istanbul and Byzanz

Istanbul looked very promising, but after a couple of failed attempts (flickering in output video) I gave up. Byzanz seemed so limited that I didn't care to even test it.

Next attempt: vnc2swf

Back in September (according to timestamps on the recorded files) I tried vnc2swf, and got impressed by the ease of use and the size of the recordings. So I decided to give it another try. The reason why I didn't just use it in the first place this time was because of a gut feeling that there was some tricky detail I had to figure out. I was correct. Getting started is easy enough (here is a recipe that helped me getting started: Creating training movies with VNC2SWF. It describes the whole process, including how to record just a piece of your desktop.) Problem was just that the resulting file sizes quickly reached above 2 MB for just a few seconds of recording the terminal. Trying to find a solution to this problem I sat until 2 am in the morning before I went to bed, adjusting settings, using the edit program that comes with pyvnc2swf and trying different versions of pyvnc2swf. I also switched off desktop effects and tried to record from KDE. A funny detail I noticed was that recordings from my terminal window seemed to be bigger than recordings of nautilus. Today I found the solution: I just switched off the transparent background in gnome-terminal, and the video sizes was back to acceptable values. Inspired by the success of turning of the transparent background in the terminal, I went back to istanbul to see if the recordings would flicker less when I'd turned off transparency on the terminal background. Disappointment: I didn't. Then I clicked a checkbox saying "record 3D", and suddenly the recordings where OK. Summary: I now have two working solutions for recording desktop screencasts. :)

More information

Here are some more details that might be interesting if you want to record screencasts under Ubuntu Intrepid:

• Resizing a window so it fits into your screencast: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/288512/resizing-a-window-to-a-set-size-in-linux.
• The pick feature in x11vnc mentioned at Creating training movies with VNC2SWF is nice, but for some reason it doesn't include window decorations. Luckily x11vnc allows you to specify exactly what piece of the screen you want to record with the clip argument, e.g: -clip 640x480+600+400 .
• pyvnc2swf documentation mentions pymedia. There's no package for it under Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), but here's a howto that describes the process (I didn't find g++-3.4 in the repositories, and I had to use libmp3lame-dev instead of liblame-dev. Then, when I tried to compile it, I got an error, but I just continued to install it using checkinstall, and it seemed to work fine anyway.) Oh, yes, here is the howto pymedia on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
• Edit 2009-01-05: I was searching for a place to download recordwin.sh, until I discovered that it was included in the tar.gz together with the rest of the stuff.

Three guys "switching to Windows"

(This post is heavily updated and is now just a list of links.)

1. Howto switch from Linux to Windows - a users experience
2. Switching to Windows: Not as easy as you think
3. Is MS Windows ready for the desktop?
4. http://www.mailinglistarchive.com/ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com/msg90388.html
5. http://climbing-the-hill.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-windows-is-not-yet-ready-for.html (added 2009-06-13)
6. http://basementcoders.com/?p=245 (added 2009-06-23)

You may like this articles or not, but, after having used Windows since 1995, I feel qualified to say that these post are not just funny, they are also informational and most of all they represent a refreshing change. :)

Also, if you know more articles like these, please add them below. Also add them to delicious with the keywords getthefacts windows whywindowsisnotready, vote them up digg or whatever you want and help spread the word :)

Do you have a good one? Leave a comment!

Ubuntu post-install customization

Here I've collected some of the things I did last time I installed Ubuntu from scratch on my commuting-part-time-LAMP-developer laptop.

• Get security upgrades.
• Install my favourite firefox extensions:
  
  • Firebug. The must have web developer extension.
  • Delicious bookmarks. I don't care much for the social part of it (at least right now,) but I consider it the best bookmarking feature I've found.
  • Scrapbook. Commuters best friend! Allows me to download web sites recursively, read, and even search in downloaded web pages.
  • All-in-One gestures. (I absolutely love keyboard shortcuts, but when I am using the mouse, why change back to the keyboard just to go back to the previous page? With mouse gestures it's just pressing the right button and drag the mouse to the left, release, welcome back.)
  • Google gears. (For offline access to Remember the Milk.)
• Install LAMP-server. (Using Synaptic.)
• Install subversion.
• Install php-pear.
• Install symfony by running the commands below in a terminal:
  
  • sudo pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
  • sudo pear install symfony/symfony-1.1.0
  (Symfony is, in my opinion, one of the best php frameworks out there. Maybe also one of the best web frameworks, regardless of language.)
• Download PHP Development Tools. Since last fall, Ive considered the eclipse based PDT a better alternative than anything else I've used, including both commercial and open source alternatives. Earlier I used to use jEdit, an awesome heavyweight text editor (hey, I've got 2 GB RAM, and I don't really care if it uses 40 MB as long as it is the best editor I know.) in combination with a lightweight alternative like notepad++ (on Windows) or gedit or kate on Linux.
• Download the php documentation.
• Using the Scrapbook extension mentioned above, download the symfony 1.1 book. (After installing the Scrapbook extension it's just a matter of right clicking the site, choose "Capture Page As..." from the context menu and set depth to follow links to "1" under "In-depth Capture". And if you're in a hurry, like me, choose "Filter" and "Restrict to Directory", so that you'll only download the relevant files.
• Install keepassx and copy the old database from the backup. I use it to keep rarely used passwords, serial keys (e.g. vmware server,) and other details that I don't want to be available for whoever uses my PC.
• Install vmware server.This used to be a matter of installing it from the repositories, but now it's slightly harder. Here is the best way I've found to install it on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, a script made by Brett Alton.

Edit 2008-07-22: Forgot a couple of details when first publishing this post last night.

• Add nautilus-gksu from repostitory.
• Add nautilus-open-terminal from repostitory.
• Add edit as root to the nautilus context menu. It really shouldn't be necessary to open a terminal to edit /etc/fstab . (e.g. for enabling acl)

Edit 2008-07-30: Another detail:

• Add php-xsl from repository. Without this, data-load doesn't work.

Btw: Seems like I'd rather use this checklist myself next time : )

Why Mandriva isn't perfect

Having used Mandriva for a couple of weeks there's a lot to like about it, like

• a nice default theme (so you don't have to use a couple of hours just to get rid of the Ubuntu-brown interface
• KDE done right: KDE looks good in Mandriva. With some other distros it's not hard to understand why people don't like KDE.
• Suspend/resume just works. Ubuntu broke suspend resume a couple of days before Hardy Heron was released, at least on my machine. (To be honest, I didn't reinstall it from scrath, that might work. But I have reported it on launchpad, and I'm not the only one who've seen this bug.)
• Elisa media player. It rocks!

However there's also something i miss about ubuntu, most notably:

• sudo. It just feels smarter than a shared root account. And if I really want to be root, I just write sudo su.
• Easy to use virtual hosts.
• Better documentation

I guess Mandriva would be a good all purpose Office and home user OS, but for development I still prefer Ubuntu, if only suspend/resume would work.

Changing from Ubuntu to Mandriva

The new Ubuntu Hardy Heron release broke suspend / resume on my hp compaq nc6320. The bug is reported on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/219657.

For me, however this was the a good excuse to try something new. So I'm running Mandriva Spring 2008.1, and it seems to be a really good release. If you think Ubuntu is well polished (I used to think so,) then think again. Mandriva just works with my laptop too, it makes KDE shine (I used to use KDE before Ubuntu,) and after a year of brown it is really refreshing to have a blue default theme.

What I miss most is sudo(!). Another thing I found out tonight was that there seems to be no bittorrent client installed by default.

I never thought of using tail that way before

While debugging a symfony app I suddenly realized that I could grep tail:

tail -f log/frontend_dev.log|grep someword

I realize it's quite obvious, it just took a couple of years before I thought of it :)