Windows 7 ship date…

Here in Viet Nam, it’s October 22 already. That means it’s the official ship date for Windows 7, and the whole world is holding its breath to see if Microsoft drops the ball (again).

When Vista was originally released, I did not get caught up in the fiasco because I was strictly a Mac OS/Linux guy. I didn’t have any active Windows systems at home. At work, the whole fracas was avoided by simply not upgrading XP systems. I read about all the fuss, but never experienced it.

I now have a PC again at home, and it’s been running Vista just fine for a little over a year. I never had any troubles with Vista and so, still, have no idea what the big deal is/was. A couple of months ago, I started running Windows 7. Access to MSDN means that I also been able to run the release code for the past month or so.

Is it better than Vista? Yes. Aesthetically, it’s much more pleasing. The new eye candy is not just pretty, it makes tracking open windows easier. It also makes arranging windows much simpler. The task bar is a much more useful tool and, because of the way program icons are now displayed in the task bar I can move it to a vertical orientation (preferred) without it looking goofy.

Has it been problem free? No. I’ve had a couple of Blue Screens of Death in the time I’ve been running Windows 7. To be honest, I think it’s a question of driver maturity. New drivers haven’t been vetted in the wild a lot. Now that the product is actually shipping, I expect this to change and I expect driver updates to resolve these issues.

Am I happy with it? Yes. Overall, I think it’s a better experience than Vista. Maybe not a lot better, but better. If I’d had a world of hurt with Vista, my opinion might be stronger, but I was unscathed by the Vista fiasco. Since Microsoft has gotten smart and is offering Family Pack Pricing on Home Premium ($149 for a limited time), the cost to upgrade is not as onerous as I thought it’d be.

It just might be worth it. This time.

21 October, 2009 | No Comments »

Jaunty Jackalope

The latest version of Ubuntu has hit, and lucky for me FTP Telecom in Viet Nam is mirroring. This means I was able to download and install in a pretty reasonable time.

How’s it look? So far, it’s rock solid. It recognized all of my hardware (Thinkpad T61 with nVIDIA card) out of the box. The install was painless–even resizing my Windows 7 partition worked. I’ve changed my Appearance settings to Dust as I prefer the darker widget look. It tends to focus my attention on the large fields I need to fill out… The look and feel are typical Ubuntu–very polished and smooth.

Of course, I did have to do a bunch of things like install the Adobe Flash plugin and decoders for MP3. Silly that, in this day, we still need to do this. I understand the reasoning but surely there’s some detente that can be reached.

Anyway, it’s great to be back in a pure Linux environment. When administering Linux systems, a Linux desktop really is the best tool for the job, at least for me. As good as tools like PuTTY are, they can’t compete with the efficiency I gain from just running at the command line.

Two big thumbs up to the Ubuntu crew for getting yet another release out the door.

25 April, 2009 | No Comments »

Music library management and SyncToy 2.0

I regularly switch between working on my desktop and my laptop. I also have an iPod. Because I’m most often with my laptop, I prefer to manage the iPod from there (Apple only lets you manage your iPod from a single computer). Music gets added to my library in an odd fashion—most often, I rip CDs on the desktop or buy from the Amazon MP3 store. Sometimes I do these things from my laptop. Often, this means that my libraries are disjointed. Tracks exist on the desktop but not on the laptop and vice versa. All of this has to get to the iPod somehow.

Enter SyncToy 2.0 from Microsoft.

SyncToy allows you to keep two directories in sync. It’s a simple, unitasking tool that does its job extremely well. Here’s how I use it:

  1. I sync my Music folder from my desktop to my NAS box
  2. I sync the Music folder from the NAS box to my laptop

SyncToy allows you to do a full sync where source and target are made the same. Files deleted from the source are removed from the target. Files added to the source are added to the target. Files changed on the target are also changed on the source. This means that the NAS music folder is changing based on additions made from either the desktop or the laptop. Those changes are reflected to both devices.

SyncToy has three operational modes:

  • Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.
  • Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.
  • Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions are performed.

You may wonder why I bother with the NAS device. It’s possible to have SyncToy just keep the folders on the desktop and laptop in sync, but including the NAS box also gives me a full backup of my music library and makes it available (read only) to other devices in the house. I can stream music to my XBOX without having to have either the desktop or the laptop up and running.

Sometimes, simple tools are the best. SyncToy does one thing and does it very well.

27 February, 2009 | Tags: , | No Comments »

Good, fast, cheap—pick…all three?!?

It’s long been a saying in this business: You can have it good, fast and cheap. Pick any two. That’s beginning to change on many levels, and the changes are starting to ripple outward.

Sun Fishworks aims to bring large volume NAS and SAN storage down to commodity pricing. They’re combining a lot of their different technologies and playing on all their strengths—most notably, Solaris. By combining the power of Solaris with low cost hardware, Sun is challenging companies like NetApp. With any luck, they’ll be able to pull it off from a marketing standpoint—an area of weakness at Sun.

The Fishworks philosophy is a great one—do more with less. I brought this home by building a NAS server for the house based around OpenSolaris and the MSI Wind PC.

OpenSolaris is installed on a 4 GB Compact Flash card that sits on the Wind PC’s motherboard. There are 2 500 GB hard drives—one in the hard drive bay and one in the optical drive bay via a 5.25 to 3.5 adapter. There is no optical drive. In this configuration you can install OpenSolaris via a USB optical drive or, like I did, via a USB thumb drive.

Once installed, the two disks are placed into a ZFS pool and, in my case, mirrored. It’s amazing how flexible and easy ZFS is to manage, particularly with the power it gives you. CIFS is now an in-kernel driver on OpenSolaris and managed via ZFS settings. Sharing volumes and directories is easy. Even NFS sharing for the Linux boxes on my network is a no-brainer.

I’m still tweaking and testing system performance, but once I’m done I’ll do a full writeup on the system. So far, it’s good, fast and cheap. Not bad at all…

18 February, 2009 | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »