Posts tagged Windows
My Review of Windows 7
Sep 3rd
A couple of days ago, I got my hands on a copy of Windows 7 Professional through MSDNAA. Both of my computers were already running on the release candidate and have now been updated to the final build, both with fresh installs.
First, some background info: It should be said that I’m not exactly a huge fan of Microsoft. I switched from Windows to Linux almost exclusively starting in 2004. Since then, I have used Linux as my day-to-day operating system, and have only used Windows when I had to, usually by way of virtualization. When I bought my new laptop in 2008, my desktop returned to Windows as it was now the weaker of the two systems and was rarely used, except for some light gaming. Then, at the beginning of this last semester, I bought a USB Tablet in order to start taking all my notes digitally. Unhappy with the note-taking apps available on Linux, I installed the Windows 7 RC onto my laptop in order to use Evernote and PDF Annotator. As a result of this, I’m looking at this operating system from the perspective of a Linux user that hasn’t used Windows on a regular basis since XP.
Windows 7 Update
May 27th
Just a short update on Windows 7. It turns out that media sharing with Media Center actually works pretty well, with little or no configuration. If you have Media set to be streamable in the Network and Sharing Center, then all you have to do on the other computer is open Media Center, select TV Shows, and move over to “Shared.” After a moment, it should show your networked computers and allow you to watch their recorded shows. However, it does not allow you to watch Live TV.
Continued Windows 7 Testing
May 18th
So, yesterday, I installed the Windows 7 RC (Again, 64bit) onto my laptop (a Thinkpad T61p).
At first, drivers seemed to be a bit of a problem, as I couldn’t get the generic Nvidia driver to install on my laptop (Most vendors only allow their specific video drivers to be installed for some reason). However, Windows Update had a working driver for me after a reboot. The main thing I find myself missing in Windows on my laptop is multiple virtual desktops, which is made possible via http://www.codeplex.com/vdm. While not as good as a native solution, it does get the job done.
My tablet works very well, once I install the Wacom driver, and I’ve been using Evernote to take notes in class. Battery life is right at what it was in Ubuntu Jaunty, which isn’t horrible, but still less than I like (of course, I’m the one that bought a desktop replacement), and wireless configuration is much improved over XP (and a little better than Vista). The new wifi interface is similar to NetworkManager’s UI, and native WPA support in Windows is certainly nice.
As soon as I booted a second copy of Windows on my network, Windows asked to connect to the other install (my desktop) to share files via “Homegroup.” Sadly, one sharing feature that I wanted was in Media Center, as I’d like to be able to play back MCE recordings over the network to my laptop. While I was able to get this working, it didn’t allow access to my tuners from my laptop.
Another big thing in Windows 7 is the new RDP. With RDP 7, Aero is possible over a decent connection. It funs flawlessly when I’m on the same network as my computer, and only lags a little bit when connecting from school using a VPN. However, as I understand it, all the rendering is being done client-side, so it’s not streaming video from the server or anything.
So far, the more I use W7, the more I like it, which for a Microsoft product is very odd.
Windows 7
May 8th
For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing with the RC of Windows 7 x64, and I thought I’d post some thoughts. More >
XPe on ESX 3.x
Jul 11th
So, after I posted my method for building and testing XPe images in Workstation, I was asked to get my XPe VMs working in ESX as well. ESX uses an older version of VMware’s Virtual Hardware, so XPe VMs I created with my previous method will not run if transferred directly to an ESX machine.
Creating the virtual hardware component is pretty straightforward, and follows the same general process as my previous guide. For your convenience, I’ve uploaded my component that I created running XP on ESX.
However, just the component isn’t enough for ESX. ESX 3.x doesn’t support virtual IDE hard drives. Likewise, Windows XPe doesn’t support SCSI drives. So, you’ll have to install the VMware SCSI driver. During a normal XP installation, you can do this by pressing F6 during installation and loading the drivers from a floppy, but because you build XPe rather than installing it, you have to componetize the driver. Again, I’ve already done this for you.
If this doesn’t work for you, you can download the floppy image containing the driver from VMware.com, extract it, and then import the vmscsi.inf file into the XPe Component Designer.
Once you have both the vmware4 and vmscsi components added to your XPe profile, run dependency checks to pull in the required components and build the image like you did in the last guide. After that, move the Virtual Machine onto your ESX box (assuming you didn’t create it there) and fire it up.
Using VMware to Build and Run XP Embedded
Jun 17th
XP Embedded Studio isn’t actually a horrible application at it’s core. Now, the user interface and documentation are God-awful, which is why I’m writing this post. As you saw in my last two entries, I’ve been working with XPe for the last few days, and there has been plenty of frustration to go along with it. What should have been a fifteen minute task wound up taking several days. However, one week and a few dozen BSODs later, I present this how to:
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More Frustrations
Jun 12th
Trying again to deal with XPe only lead to more frustrations today. I managed to get the virtual disk marked as bootable, and the virtual machine did start up, but then I was faced with another problem. As is, the image would complain that it couldn’t find System32driverspci.sys, so, I rebuilt the image and included the PCI subsystem that contained the needed file. After rebuilding the image and again booting to it, the image bluescreened as soon as it started loading. Removing pci.sys fixed the bluescreen, but reverted to the other problem. I still have some tinkering to do, but I don’t know how successful it will be.
During some of my sporadic downtime when Windows was crashed, loading, or rebooting, I took a look at the iPhone SDK and emulator. Some of the webapps for the iPhone are really impressive, notably Facebook and Meebo. I even found a plugin/theme for Wordpress to make a site more iPhone friendly and set it up for Collegegeek.org. I haven’t started coding anything yet, but the first step will be to start learning some Objective C.
Embedded Headache
Jun 11th
Today, I had a unique opportunity to work with Window XP Embedded.
*Shudders*
Microsoft has made some lousy products in the past, but the Embedded SDK has to be one of the worst. The application isn’t remotely intuitive to use, and even once you’ve learned what you’re doing, it’s not easy. The task I had was simple: create an XPe image to test a particular program with. However, this was far more difficult than it needed to be. Even though I had a list of the DLLs that I needed, there was no easy way to find those DLLs in the XPe tools. Each time that I wanted to load a DLL, I had to manually create a new filter for “Contains” and the name of the DLL, rather than use the integrated search box. For some reason, the search box would not look at the names of the DLL files themselves, just the name of the packages they were in. Even creating a filter didn’t work 100% of the time (actually, I don’t think it even found 10% of the files I needed).
Secondly, the built in dependency generation was a joke. When you clicked on “Build,” it would ask you if you wanted to automatically fulfill dependencies. You click yes, and it does that, but it’s not recursive. Whast I mean, is after it’s done, and you click “Build” again, you know have X number of new components that need to have their dependencies checked, and so XPe will go on to scan every component again. It took 5 or 6 rounds of dependency checking before it was finally happy for me. Then, I got to build the image. The software did some hocus pocus, and then spat out a standard looking C: filetree in a directory on my hard drive. Now what? I had Program Files, Documents and Settings, and WINDOWS, but no idea what to do with them. I tried putting them on a virtual 512MB hard disk and creating a virtual machine to boot to it, but no luck, there was no MBR on the disk. After 30 minutes or so of reading documentation on the matter, I called it quits for the day and went on to work on other things.
I know it’s not an impossible issue to overcome, and I’m sure I’ll get past it tomorrow, but creating an embedded image was far more difficult than it needed to be, and in my opinion, should be handled something like this:
- Start a new Embedded project.
- Load any number of executables that you need your system to run into the project. The software scans the EXEs to determine which libraries they are linked against, and copies those files into the project as well. (Visual Studio has a tool to scan an EXE and determine it’s dependencies, so this should be possible.) The included EXEs will be copied into Program Files when the image is created.
- Create a profile of the hardware that the image needs to run on, and load the appropriate drivers. For more common hardware, this could be done automatically, otherwise, the user could manually download and add the needed drivers.
- Now, perform a single, recursive, dependency check to satisfy all of the previously included components.
- Finally, export the image to a specified format, such as a CD ISO for installing the image, or a bootable USB jump drive.
That’s just a rough outline, but I think that it’s relatively feasible and that creation of embedded systems could be much easier.
Windows: Past, Present, and Future
Apr 3rd
As a computer science student, I’m allowed access to free copies of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Recently, I’ve been downloading and trying different versions of it out of pure boredom, and felt like typing up some impressions. The versions of Windows that I looked at were 2000 Professional SP4, XP Professional SP2, 2003 Server Enterprise SP2, and Vista Business. They all have their pros and cons, of course, but it’s interesting to see what has changed over the last decade or so.
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Windows Applications in Linux with SeamlessRDP
Mar 31st
There are several ways to run Windows applications under Linux. One of the most common ways is through wine, which redirects system calls to effectively emulate windows programs under Linux. Another popular solution is through virtualization products such as VMWare. In this post, I will describe a method for virtualizing single applications rather than the entire operating system, so you only see the program you’re trying to run rather than the entire OS.
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