The good news is that I installed Linux on the laptop. The bad news is that I installed Ubuntu on the laptop, and configured it to dual-boot with Windows XP Professional.

So, why? Here’s the deal. Linux does not like my laptop. When I installed openSUSE on it a couple months ago, I had no ACPI, no modem, and no wireless, which pretty much renders a laptop with only half of a battery useless. I was forced to put XP Pro back on there, and further hope was seemingly ruined when I heard that I had to use Windows for some school stuff, and no WINE was not going to cut it.

Luckily my laptop didn’t have that much stuff on it, so yesterday I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu Linux on the laptop. But somehow I managed to keep Windows alive . Here’s what I did:

1. I should have backed up my data. Don’t ask me why I didn’t, I just didn’t. But if you decide to do this, back up your data first, or the results could be catastrophic, as I almost found out.
2. Rebooted into the Knoppix LiveDVD
3. Resized the NTFS filesystem my D: drive, which was 15 (out of 30) GB, down to 5GB. This was by far the hardest step! The first time I attempted this, my laptop froze. The second time, the thing powered down, probably because of yet another false thermal alarm. I haven’t found any corrupted data yet, but that’s probably because I made sure to boot Windows (and thus run CHKDSK) after each failure.
4. Resized the partition itself. The resizentfs command only shrinks the filesystem, it doesn’t shrink the partition it’s on. I did this with the QtParted utility.
5. Created a 9.25GB ext3 partition (which can be read from Windows thanks to the ext2 IFS driver)
6. Rebooted into Windows to verify that everything was safe
7. Booted into the Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft beta) CD, and installed Ubuntu on /dev/hda3. Make absolutely sure that if you do this, you change the GRUB target partition to (hd0,#) where # is the Linux partition number minus 1. Otherwise your Windows MBR will get corrupted, and you will be stuck using FDISK or equivalent to fix it.
8. Fussed with the boot menus. A lot. Currently my active partition is #1, so the Windows NTLDR boots by default. I have GRUB for Windows installed (it’s included with RiPLinuX) so what I do to boot Ubuntu is select GRUB from the NTLDR menu, then select the Ubuntu partition from the WinGRUB menu, then select Ubuntu from the GRUB menu on the Ubuntu partition. Why so many steps? Because when I update/upgrade Ubuntu, which will be quite a lot, the GRUB configuration will be seamlessly auto-upgraded. After I write this post I plan to set hda3 as my active partition, that way I can use a chainloader to boot XP Pro and I will only have to use one menu at startup.
9. Only for systems that use the Intel i845 chipset: Ubuntu has this thing with being able to magically support ACPI on almost every recent computer. Hibernation mode worked without any configuration on my part. To get suspend to work, I had to compile this utility called video_post and update my ACPI config. Here’s a tar archive of the video_post utility and the updated acpid resume script. Untar it in your root directory with “sudo tar xzCf / ./ubuntu-intel-video-post.tar.gz” and try suspending/hibernating

What the heck, Microsoft? Why in the world do we need all these protect-you-from-yourself security features, big, beautiful graphics, and a screen that pops up just to say, “Dan, welcome to your computer.” Oh my goodness, that’s about the lamest line I’ve ever heard. And guess what? I know what I’m doing when I pop open Microsoft Management Console or try to manually set the IP for my ethernet card.

And where in the world are the “Vista Ultimate Extras?” Oh yeah, “Uh, we’ll release some extras once the final retail version hits the shelves.” Uh-huh. They’re supposedly integrated into Windows Update. I sure didn’t see any “Vista Ultimate Extras” in there.

My worst experience, though, was the installation. M$ devs, come on, who taught you how to update a boot record? Your grandmas? Here’s the deal. Linux is better than Windows (don’t ask me why, you pea-brains wouldn’t understand). Therefore, Linux gets the first primary hard disk partition (obviously formatted with a filesystem that you’ve never heard of – ReiserFS in this case) and your wimpy, poorly-written little beta gets the second primary partition. Anyway, I had to boot into SuSE and create a Vista VM using VMware and set it up completely just so I could format a floppy and copy 3 files to it while making sure the boot record is correct. Maybe you guys should learn that if you’re installing on a primary partition, and the partition is not the first one on the drive, then you should install the bootloader to the partition and mark the partition as active. But my major beef with Windows is the fact that it completely ignores all the non-Microsoft filesystems out there. I had to create a 25GB FAT32 partition to use for exchanging files between Linux and Windows. The folks over at Linux are all trying really hard to support your filesystems, shouldn’t you do the same for them? Good. You can start with adding LVM support, and adding the ability to read ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS filesystems, since that’s what the vast majority of Linux distros use anyway.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah. The “Flip 3D” is hideous. I’ve seen better stuff in DOS pinball sims (running on the DOSBox emulator, which contains no M$ code btw). The stupid “curtain” or whatever animation during Setup slowed my fairly competent system down to a crawl and a stage that should have taken a couple of seconds took at least 2 minutes.

Here’s the problem: I would call all those visual FX awesome if it hadn’t been for the fact that Compiz (www.compiz.net) does a much better job of making the workspace actually more productive instead of just more pretty. Compiz has this cube thingy that you can drag and rotate, and essentially you can have anywhere from 4 to 32 virtual screens on that cube. And yes, I mean different windows on each cube face. Plus it actually runs at a usable speed (about 60FPS on my box) while consuming minimal system resources.

So for those of you who like it when a writer sums up his article, and for those of you who just skip the article and read the conclusion, here it is: I am not going to buy Windows Vista unless all three of those problems up there (bootsector problem, filesystem support, and more Ultimate Extras) get fixed and soon. If I buy it, I’ll buy Ultimate, but if I don’t buy it I’ll just crack the beta (shouldn’t be too hard) and use that until Blackcomb comes out and M$ tries once again to secure the IT world while (probably) just making computers even harder to use (as if that’s even possible at this point).

A couple of days ago I downloaded and installed Synergy, but I didn’t do most of the work until today. I instralled Synergy on lapdawg and nighthawk on Wednesday and was unsuccessful in getting it to work because it failed to properly look up the NetBIOS hostname “nighthawk” (it didn’t exist, really) and it refused to let me use Nighthawk’s IP address. So I left it alone and ignored it for a couple of days, but I remembered the “hosts” file today and figured that if I put Nighthawk’s IP in there then maybe Synergy would work. So I tried it, and…TADA! it worked. Unfortunately, due to a (apparently one-time) firewall bug, Lapdawg bluescreened and I had to reboot. 0xD1 and fwdrv.sys – a.k.a. Kerio Firewall – for those who are interested (ahem, Microsoft?).

So I got the laptop to work with Synergy. But what about BigMomma? So I transferred the Synergy tarball over via FTP and *cough* compiled it myself *cough*.

Now, there is something that you all must understand about NetBIOS. It’s a Windows thing. Linux hosts do not normally have NetBIOS hostnames, and even if the Samba service is running, the firewall often blocks out the NetBIOS ports. So that’s why my network is too cool for NetBIOS. Actually, I prefer to call it “too secure” for NetBIOS. (hint hint, nudge nudge, Mr. Gate$.)

The problem with FC4 is, it has this thing with multiple hostnames (one for each network interface). So I can’t make BigMomma part of the “fuhrykitchentable” domain and have my loopback interface be localhost at the same time. And anyone who’s at all experienced with Apache web server knows that the hostname assigned to lo (that’s LO, the Unix way to refer to the loopback iface) must be “localhost.localdomain” in order to start. No different on the highly-superior-to-other-distros Fedora Core 4. So, after a little help from Neal, I taught BigMomma that 192.168.2.40 is more commonly known as “nighthawk” and that 192.168.2.39 prefers to be called “lapdawg.” Unfortunately, BigMomma still thought of herself as “localhost”, so when I tried to connect to Nighthawk using Synergy, it failed because BigMomma called herself “localhost” instead of “bigmomma.” Thank God for the guy who wrote Synergy’s documentation – I was able to use aliases to teach Synergy that “localhost” was really “bigmomma”. So finally I got Synergy to remote-control BigMomma.

And then I remembered one thing: BigMomma spends 95% of her time in text mode (to save RAM). Why in the world would I need to control her using a KM program?

So I was browsing the Compiz forums this morning and I stumbled across a thread where some guy had posted a screenie of his super Mac-ified GNOME/Xgl/Compiz desktop. You can guess what I spent the next 8 hours doing and now both BigMomma and Nighthawk have this strange Steve Jobs-ified look.