The overall windows experience. Week 2 on the new box.

This is a the first time I've used a windows machine as my primary box in a long time, (we have one for gaming at home, and I have a mostly unused desktop at work...

There's a couple things that are nice:

1. Suspend and resume works, though this laptop has 2GB of ram and it suspends really slowly.
   
   
2. It's nice to have media on all websites play back for a change.
   
   
3. More open-source software seems to have been ported to windows and works well. GIMP, gnu dia, GAIM, slypheed, clamav etc.
   
   
4. bluetooth is easy to setup, but it doen't really work all that well which is slightly disapointing. linux and bluez is rather harder but it's rock solid once you get it working.
   

Some things are not so good though...

1. You still have to restart way too often... Either because you've installed some piece of software or a driver that requires it or because for whatever reason some piece of software generally part of the UI has become unstable.
   
   
2. Sometimes software just mysteriously fails to install, or after installing doesn't work. There's muc more diagnostics for this in linux systems then there is in windows boxen. When you uninstall someting on a rpm package mangement based system you can be pretty sure it's all gone. that's way more ambiguous on windows.
   
   
3. The initial load on this acer was horrible... some things I had no trouble installing on the Dell, Just refused to work properly (windowblinds). The system came with software to backup the image on the disk, but didn't come with installation media. reinstalling the os using an oem disk and the key on the bottom of the laptop solved that for the most part except some if the acer provided drivers (ati catalyst control panel) refused to properly install. not all the software (the cd burning stuff or the dvd player) were avaialble for download. norton antivirus which came bundled with it is junk and is now gone.
   
   
4. Drivers for some of my older usb hardware (usb serial adapter) are now rather hard to find... these things for the most part just work on linux.
   
   
5. Does somebody make a virtual window manger/pager for windows that doesn't crash, lose windows, end up with the same window on multiple pages unitentionally and fits someplace in the start-bar? cool-desk had lots of promise but it has all those problems. The windows powertools one install but now appear not to work (that problem again) and I remeber not liking it anyway. it's shouldn't be that hard a problem to solve.
   

Parallels for windows, revisted...

Has actually ended up being fairly unusable for me...

The fc5 instance routinely stops responding to me during normal use. Initially I thought this has something to do with the xserver but it happens if I start a vnc server then point the windows vnc-client at that over the virtual network interface as well.

Virtualization does not survive the windows suspend and resume cycle. Normally if you suspend the parallels vm on it's own it will resume properly after you wake, or in fact after you restart the laptop, but if you leave it running, it'll fail when the machine resumes either that or you may get a BSOD.

VMware player would happily survive a suspend and resume cycle on linux (at least with a freebsd guest). Though suspend and resume for the linux laptop (the dell inspiron 6000) wasn't all that reliable to begin with.

Dirty boy, redux.

07302006(001)
Originally uploaded by joelja.

dumpster full of closed cell foam.

Wow!

07302006(002)
Originally uploaded by joelja.

Is that box big enough...

Don't try assembling a chatsworth megaframe in your office.

I'm a dirty boy...

07302006
Originally uploaded by joelja.

Who knew I had enough cardboard in my office to fill an entire dumpster?

Interview with bsdtalk

I was interviewed by bsdtalk about the NSRC:

http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2006/07/bsdtalk056-interview-with-joel-jaeggli.html

Easy come, easy go...

Slackers broke into the car on a public street in broad daylight in front of witnesses and took:

mobile-edge backpack
dell insprion 6000
dell latitude d620 (in my possession for 4 days)
two power dell bricks
pelican m-1 led flashlight
nokia bluetooth keyboard

part of my soul

Playinging with Parallels

So, my initial approach was to install it on the new windows box so that I could run an instance of fedora core 5 on top of it. The default mode for networking appears to be to bridge parallel's private network interface which is shared with the virutal machines to one of of your network interfaces. For some reason the guest could not in fact see the dhcp response even though running tcpdump reveleaed that packets from the external interface were making it to the internal network... It is possbile that this has something to do with the windows firewall. I disabled it for testing purposes and it didn't appear to make a difference.

My quick and dirty solution was simply to enable internet connection sharing and treat the Parallels network as though it were the internal private network . Notwithstanding the joys of nat, that's probably saner anyway because static ip's can now be enabled on each of the guests and they can still talk to the outside world... Not sure what to do about IPV6 at this point.

whr-g54s now $39.95

Guess I should pick up a couple before they get discontinued...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833162173

Parallels Workstation...

Seems a lot cheaper than vmware these days...

http://www.parallels.com/

not a replacement for doctor fun

http://www.catandgirl.com/

will have to follow up on this one however.

http://bunny.frozenreality.co.uk/

mirror with freebsd geom...

I was sort of wondring how to do this so a tutorial is kind of nice.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html

I'm sure that I will shortly be doing this on 2 drive 1u servers to keep the costs down.

This thing is cool...

http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html

hadn't seen this before...

clusterknoppix

had seen:

open mosix

But it appears to have matured a bit...

Portland airport portal

Actually bothers to tell you which ap you're on:

banging on freebsd ports

Got a local ports/distfiles repository you've been filling up?

Do the following:

/etc/make.conf
MASTER_SITE_BACKUP=ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/ports/distfiles/${DIST_SUBDIR}/
MASTER_SITE_FREEBSD=yes

http://ws.edu.isoc.org/workshops/2005/pre-SANOG-VI/ha/intro-freebsd/intro-freebsd-exercises.html#ports

doing a similar thing with packages you can do by setting the enviornment variable:

# export PACKAGEROOT=ftp://ftp3.FreeBSD.org

hm...

http://www.networkthinktank.com/index.php

My response on the pc recycling by donating issue.

With regards to obsolete computers being precieved as useful in the third world, there are generally a few problems with that.

First, machines no longer useful in the western world are in general expected to run the same software that they're no longer useful for when donated to some pc recycling project in say Mozambique. Most of of the software will be pirated but that isn't want this message is about.

Second... Computer hardware (especially laptops) doesn't age gracefully. disks die, powersupplies fail, fans on heatsinks fail, crt's wear out. machines fill up with dust etc... A PC that's marginal in an airconditioned office on conditioned power, is likely to be useless with unstable power and 35c weather.

Third. eventually this stuff has to be discarded. New machines have gradually contained lower quanties of heavy metals toxic plastics, toxic battery formulations... At this point one probably wouldn't feel to bad about landfilling an RHOS (reduction of hazardous substances) compliant pc whereas most 486 and pentium class machines (with the exception of some ibm and fujitsu machines that were designed for certain markets) are classified as toxic waste once they're parted out. These machines are hard to recycle responsibly even in the United States.

So what to do?

If you donate, send new machines, the lifespan of their utility will be much longer. New machines are less toxic than old ones, RHOS machines are even less so. Send LCDs not CRT's, yean non-RHOS lcd's contain heavy metals, but a lot less than CRT's...

A lot of people see donating old hardware as a philanthropic activity and it certainly can be, but in many cases it's just people dumping their waste in the third world. That's just evading responsiblity back home and it doesn't do the recipients of the "aid" any good.

Open Laptop Per Child, some thoughts...

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004543.html

There's a sea-change about how we think about computers in schools in here someplace even in places where these aren't actually going to be deployed (like the United States)...

Some of it's going on, on the web already (freeform colaborative environments) but that stuff just get's filtered at the borders of schools. Lab machines and classroom machines get locked down and run obsolete proprietery software. So computers in schools aren't really the source of inovation and potentially new pedagogy that they once were, they're just a requirement for the educational process.

That's worth $170

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/8426/