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.

Test Computers:

Dragon (Desktop):

• Core i7 920 2.66GHz
• 6GB DDR3-1333
• 300GB 10,000rpm hard drive
• 2x Geforce GTS 250 1GB

Krayt (Laptop):

• Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz
• 4GB DDR2-667
• 160GB 7,200rpm hard drive
• Quadro FX 570m 256MB

Both computers serve different purposes.  My laptop is my general day-to-day machine, handling internet browsing, communication, and development.  My desktop, on the other hand, is primarily used for gaming and anything else that would potentially need or make use of it’s processing power.  Both machines use WUXGA (1920×1200) displays, and both are running the x64 version of Windows 7 Professional.

First impression:

I had used the Windows 7 beta in a virtual machine, and the release candidate on actual hardware, so the user interface wasn’t much of a shock to me. I was struck, however, at how clean the default desktop is.

The default desktop on Windows 7

Unfortunately, it’s not a sight that most people will see, as most people get Windows preinstalled on their computer, and most vendors will load it down with additional software.

User Interface Improvements:

The most prominent UI change is the new taskbar, which abandons the Icon/Window Name approach we’ve grown used to in favor of a more “dock-like” style that shows only a larger application icon for each running program.  While several people have complained about this, I personally like it as it does help to clean up all the clutter that can be onscreen when several applications are running.  When you click on an application’s icon, it pops out to show all windows in that application.  The taskbar also now has the functionality of the quick launch bar.  Applications can be “stuck” to the taskbar, meaning their icons remain visible even if the program is not running. Active applications’ icons are shown in a box, while the launchers are not.  In the screenshots below, Eclipse is not running.

The newly designed Windows 7 taskbar

The taskbar showing an application with multple windows

Another new feature of the new taskbar is the ability to embed controls in the popup, as shown in this media player screenshot:

Media player controls embedded in window preview

The start menu has remained mostly the same from Vista, with a couple minor tweaks.  First, the search functionality has been expanded to include items from the Control Panel, and items in the start menu can now fly out to list “tasks” which usually list the most commonly used functions of that application.

The start menu

The start menu showing an application's tasks

Included Applications:

Internet Explorer 8:

It’s Internet Explorer. Really, what do you want to know? The user interface is almost identical to IE7, although it does now appear to run each tab in a separate process, similar to the way Google Chrome works.  It also features several “accelerators” which are basically context menus that allow it to easily hook into Windows Live services from anywhere. Beyond that, I can’t comment much except to say it did an excellent job of downloading Google Chrome for me.

Media Player 12:

Likewise, Media Player hasn’t changed much since it’s previous release (version 11). The only difference that I notice immediately is the hook in with the new taskbar, which I mentioned above.  Although, it seems to have come a ways (at least since XP) in file format support, especially related to video.  At least to the point that I haven’t bothered to install VLC yet.  However, with more advanced codecs, you will need to install something, whether it’s a new player or just plugins for WMP.  The first file type that wouldn’t play for me was an mkv.

Wordpad:

Wordpad

Wordpad, on the other hand, has seen significant changes.  The user interface has been updated to resemble that of Microsoft Office 2007 with the “ribbon” UI element.  Like IE, though, I can’t comment in depth as I don’t really use it.  However, it does support both Office Open XML and OpenDocument Text formats, which should make it a decent word processor for people who don’t want to shell out for office.

Paint:

Paint

Paint is another app that has received the ribbon treatment, though it’s functionality stays largely the same.

Performance:

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lower end system on which to test Windows 7.  However, my manager at VMware did run the beta on his Dell Mini 9 (specs: Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz, 2GB DDR2-667, Intel GMA 950, 16GB SSD), and seeing as, in my experience, the OS has been further refined since the beta release, it stands to reason it should run just as well now.  Performance on the netbook seemed to be just fine, as it was able to run Aero without issue and run a few application concurrently, usually Firefox, Outlook, and some sort of instant messaging software.

On my laptop (and of course desktop), Windows 7 absolutely flies.  Startup is quick, and resuming from sleep or hibernate is even quicker (usually just a few seconds).  It connects to wifi instantly (and is ready to go by the time I’ve typed my password to unlock the machine).

(As I’m out in San Francisco at the moment, I don’t have access to my desktop to test startup and shutdown times, among other things.)

Security:

Windows 7 continues to use UAC for security measures, and I continue to urge people to use it.  It operates in a similar manner to sudo in Linux distros, by only elevating user permissions when they are needed.  However, it does popup less often than in Vista.  While it is still being used for any action that needs it, minor actions (such as opening Resource Monitor, or changing the system clock) do not prompt the user for permission, but go ahead and elevate permissions for that action.  The primary action that I notice actually prompting for permission is now application installation.

Windows 7 ships with Windows Firewall and Windows Defender as well, although I still augment those with my own antivirus. During the RC testing stages, I used AVG’s free antivirus tool, and now I’m using ESET’s NOD32.  Both applications work well and are detected by Windows 7, but the primary reason for my switch was the increasing nagging of AVG to upgrade to their paid version.  So far I’ve yet to have a Virus or Spyware infection (knock on wood).

Conclusion:

Windows 7 is a very usable operating system. If you need to run Windows applications and have moderately decent hardware, I’d suggest it over XP or Vista.  The included applications are reasonably useful, and by the virtue of it being Windows, there are a ton of additional applications available for installation.  It also (for the moment at least) tends to have a leg up on XP in terms of security, and is less invasive in that regard than Vista.  Hardware support is also excellent, the only driver that I installed on either system was a video driver.

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.

For the most part, W7 looks a lot like Vista, as they both use the same themes.  The only major difference is the new taskbar, which does away with text labels in favor of larger icons, making it feel more like a dock than a taskbar.  The new taskbar also has some additional functionality that developers will need to hook into first, but for an example, try hovering your mouse over Windows Media Player’s icon while its running to get controls without needing to bring the window up.

Most of the included applications are the same as what are currently available for Vista (IE8, MP11, etc.), but in particular, Media Center has been greatly improved to support QAM, meaning I can now watch and record local HD stations and Digital Cable.

W7 now ships with a decent screengrabber rather than forcing you to PrintScrn and paste into Paint (It’s called “Snipping Tool” and can actually be installed on Windows XP or Vista). Speaking of Paint, its UI has also been overhauled… not that I ever use it.

Most of the changes in W7 are so called “Under the Hood” improvements (hence the version number of 6.1, up from Vista’s 6.0).  While I don’t have any numbers for comparison, it does seem incredibly fast, but on my desktop, that’s not a surprise.  W7 is supposedly less resource intensive, most likely due to the recent netbook craze, and I did get a chance to see the Beta running on a Dell Mini 9 last semester.

Computer enthusiasts will be happy to know that the Windows Experience Index cap has been raised (from 5.9 to 7.9), so they can go back to worrying over what’s bottlenecking their system now (For me it’s my 10,000rpm Velociraptor drive).

One disappointment so far has been that Google Chrome 1.0 doesn’t seem to want to play nicely with W7. I’ve been getting the “Oh, Snap” error page pretty frequently since upgrading.  I’ve yet to give the 2.0 beta a try, but I’ll be doing that shortly (though nothing in the changelog mentioned improved W7 compatibility).

Windows 7 final is supposed to be out by the end of this year.

EDIT:

Chrome 2.0 seems to be much more stable on Windows 7… Huzzah!

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.

vmware4.sld

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.

vmscsi.zip

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.

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:

The idea here is to use VMware to not only run, but create your XPe images, though you could easily do the development in your host environment with only minor changes to these directions.

Step 1: Prepare your development environment

First, let’s get the virtual machines set up.  You’ll need at least two, one for doing the development, and another to test the image.  The first image is just a regular Windows XP virtual machine.  I already had a Windows XP Pro virtual machine that I use on a daily basis, so I just used that.  You’ll need to set up the Windows XP Embedded development environment.  If you don’t already have it, you can download a 30 day evaluation copy from Microsoft.

Now, go ahead and create the second virtual machine, which you will use to run your XPe image.  Create a new VM in VMware and choose Windows XP Professional as the Guest OS. (Note: If you are using WS 6.5 or later, you don’t want to use easy install.  Choose to install the guest OS later.)  I selected some pretty basic specs for the VM:

• Memory: 256MB
• Processors: 1
• Hard Disk (IDE 0:0): 512MB

It doesn’t take much to run XPe, and those listed specs should be fine unless you’ll be putting a lot of data on the image.

Now that your VM is created, you need to add it’s hard drive to your original XP VM.  Make sure your XP VM is shut down, then open the Virtual Machine Settings dialog and click Add.  Choose to add a new Hard Disk, and when prompted, choose to add an existing virtual disk.  Navigate to your XP Embedded Virtual Machine and choose the vmdk associated with it.  After it has been added, open the Advanced properties for that disk and make it Independent and Persistent.

Step 2: Load a profile of your virtual hardware

This was the part that gave me grief.  Fortunately for you, you can benefit from my experience.  You need a profile of the hardware you will be running XPe on so that XPe knows which drivers to load.

Step 2a: The easy way

I have prepared a component for Windows XPe that will automatically load in a set of generic drivers that are capable of running on VMware virtual hardware version 6, which is the version used in Workstation 6.0.  If you are using Workstation 6.5, it uses version 7 of VMware’s virtual hardware.  Chances are you’ll still be able to use my component, and you should definately try it.

Download my XPe VMware Component

You’ll need to install the .sld file using the Component Database Manager.

If you ultimately wind up with an unbootable XPe image, you’ll want to come back and perform the steps in 2b, but for now, proceed to step 3.

Step 2b: The not-so-easy way

So, you need to create your own profile for your virtual machine.  First, you’ll want to create a third VM.  Again, it should be Windows XP Professional, and the hardware should be as similar to your XPe VM as possible, though you’ll need more hard drive space.  I wound up needing about 1.5GB of disk space for this step, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to allocate more just in case.

Install Windows XP Professional (Professional is important here) on the new virtual machine.  It’s very important that you DO NOT install VMware tools on this VM (This gave me trouble during my experimenting).  This means that if you’re using VMware 6.5 or later, you need to install the OS manually and not use Easy Install. (Note: You don’t need to bother activating this VM if you don’t want to, you’ll only need it for a minute.)

Once you have a vanilla installation of XP Pro up and running, you’ll need some of the XPe tools.  Go back to that link I posted near the beginning of this post and download and run the XPe downloader again.  This time, you only need the Windows XP Embedded SP1 Tools package, which is around 7 MB.

Let that download and start(You may get a warning, ignore it), then choose to Browse the CD.  Open the fodler named XPE and look for a file named TAP.EXE (Or probably just TAP, as XP will hide the file extensions by default).  Double-click it and it will run, leaving behind a file named devices.pmq in that same directory.  Now you need to get that pmq file back to your original XP VM where you’re doing the XPe development.  I just opened Internet Explorer and Gmailed it to myself.  Once you have the pmq file, you don’t need this extra VM anymore and you can delete it.

Back in your original VM, grab your devices.pmq file and put it somewhere on the hard drive.  Now open Microsoft Component Designer and choose File > Import and open devices.pmq.  Go through the import process, then if you want you can give your component a name and other info.  Finally, save the component as a *.sld file and then import that sld using the Component Database Manager.  Now your component should be available when building XPe images.

Step 3: Create the Image

Open the XPe Target Designer and start a new project.  On the left hand side of the window, you should see a list of components, including the VMware hardware profile that you either downloaded from me or created yourself.  Double click it to add it to the project.

Now, press F5 to perform a dependency check.  It will run through and automatically add most of the needed components, but it will need your input on a few of them.  If you are using my profile, you should wind up with 6 errors, which will be displayed at the bottom of the screen.  For each item, double click the icon next to it to see the list of available components that will satisfy that dependency.  Choose the components that best suit your need, but for a standard set up, I recommend using the following whenever they come up as options:

• NT Loader
• FAT
• Windows Logon

After all of the dependencies are taken care of, it’s time to… run another dependency check!  For some reason, Microsoft doesn’t do recursive dependency checking here.  Press F5 again, and wait for it to finish.  At this point there should be one more error, the shell.  Handle this one just like the last set.  For a standard set up, I’d recommend just using the Explorer Shell.

Continue to run dependency checks until it comes back with no errors.

You’re almost there.  At this point, it’s a good idea to save your work.

Step 4: Prepare the virtual disk

Open up XP’s built in disk manager and find your XPe VM’s hard drive that you attached to your original XP VM.  Make sure it is initialized, then partition and format the entire disk as FAT32.

You’ll also need to make sure that the partition is marked as bootable.  You can do this however you like, I booted the VM to an Ubuntu Live CD and used the built in partition editor.

Step 5: Build XP Embedded

Back in the Target Designer, you need to build the XPe image.  To do this, press F7.  For build type, choose Release.  For Destination, enter the path where your XPe VM’s is mounted, for example, D: or E:.  Note that it will be mounted at C: in XPe.  Finally, press Build.  If all goes well, you will get no errors, and maybe a warning or two.

Step 6: Run it

Only one VM can access a particular vmdk at a time, so you’ll want to suspend your XP VM now.  Once that’s done, switch over to your XPe VM and power it on.  If you’ve done everything correctly, you should be a Windows XP Embedded loading screen, then the First Boot Assistant, after which it will boot into your embedded environment.

Congratulations! You now have a minimal XPe system that is capable of running on virtual hardware.  In order to add additional components to your XPe image, shut down the VM and resume your original XP VM.  Modify the image as you see fit, then reformat the target disk and build again.  There shouldn’t be a need to mark the partition as bootable again.

If your XPe image crashed, you’ll need to do some debugging.  If you were using my pre-made profile, go back to Step 2b and create a profile yourself.  This should be guaranteed to work, but if not, I’d start by checking for information on MSDN.  If your image is crashing with a BSOD, try Googling the error number and seeing what you get.

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.

*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:

1. Start a new Embedded project.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Now, perform a single, recursive, dependency check to satisfy all of the previously included components.
5. 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.

All of these were installed and tested on a virtual machine with 512MB of dedicated memory in VMWare Workstation 6.

Windows 2000 Professional:

Before today, I had never actually installed and used Windows 2k. Back when I actually used Windows on a daily basis, I had made the jump from 98 directly to XP, so I didn’t really know what to expect from 2000. My initial impression was that it was very quick, which stands to reason as 512MB of memory was a lot back in 2000. However, I was stuck at 800×600 and 16 bit color until I installed the proper video drivers.

Windows 2000 took me back a lot farther than I expected it to. I was anticipating something similar to XP running in classic mode, but the user interface was much closer to that of 98. Windows 2000 came with the ancient Internet Explorer 5, which I used just long enough to go and download Firefox 2.0, which looks very shiny relative to the rest of the applications in 2000. Then for fun, I decided to see just how many updates there were to install, but it appeared I had to update Update before I could update to the latest updates. Then, I had to install Internet Explorer 6 in order to see any updates. At this point, I don’t care enough to keep playing with 2000, so I move on.

Windows XP Professional:

What can I say? XP is XP. There really wasn’t anything of note here other than my usual bitching about it, which is why I don’t actually use it on a day to day basis.

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise:

Server 2k3 is essentially the server version of XP. I initially downloaded 2003 because I used it in the remote desktop trick that I wrote about a few days ago. Server 2003 manages to be a fairly stable operating system when compared to XP, although I haven’t put it through much. While I never made use of any of the actual “server” services of it, it made a decent client OS as well, and sometimes it replaces XP for me when I need to virtualize something. In particular, 2003 really doesn’t like to be shut down, so I generally suspend the virtual machine rather than powering it off.

Windows Vista Business:

And here’s the impression that really matters today. Now, I’ve been saying bad things about Vista since I used it during open beta testing, but it’s possible that Microsoft has done a little better than I had expected them to. Now, it’s still utter shit, but as far as shit goes, it’s not that bad. It is the fillet mignon of shit, if you will.

Now sadly, the first thing I saw when I booted Vista up for the first time was the log in screen. Robin Williams once had the following to say about golf, “…you can wear colors that would make even a blind, gay man go ‘Oh, dear Christ.’” Well, the Windows Vista login screen invokes a similar reaction. The rest of the stupid effects I was able to disable and revert to the “classic look,” but the login screen remained there to torment me. Now, a couple other things Microsoft did go over the top on. For instance, I can’t properly play Solitaire now because it requires 3D acceleration, and I’ve yet to figure out how to disable the stupid animations.

However, there are a few things that Microsoft has really improved on. The first thing is the directory structure of the C drive. If you open up the C drive in Vista, you’ll only see three folders: Program Files, Users, and Windows. As always, Program Files contains your applications and Windows contains the operating system itself. However, your personal directories are now located at C:UsersYourUserName so for me, C:UsersZach. This is much better than the previous way of doing things which was to put them at C:Documents and SettingsZach TibbittsMy Documents. As a terminal junkie, it’s a lot easier to cd into my home directory now than it was in XP.

The next thing that has been somewhat improved in Vista (and I use the term somewhat here, because some things may have been changed for the worse) is the overall design of the user interface. I’m not talking about Aero, which is roughly as useless as my pet cat, but the design of the interface itself. The Start Menu is the most obvious example. Gone are the endless nested menus, and instead there is a simple list of applications. Clicking on All Programs displays the rest of the installed programs, but instead of popping up another menu, they are displayed in the original Start Menu.

Now, there are a few things that Microsoft left out of Vista that they really should have included. The first is Windows Powershell, also known as Monad. Although you can install it later, it really should have been included by default. The second thing is WinFS, a new filesystem to replace the archaic NTFS filesystem in use now. However, Microsoft scrapped WinFS some time ago, which is sad really, as NTFS is almost 14 years old at this point.

Then there’s the UAC. It’s intrusive, it’s annoying, but if you insist on using Vista then take my advice: learn to love it and never turn it off. It only takes a fraction of a second to click ok whenever you need administrative rights, and the benefit of an extra level of protection from a malicious software installer or a random PEBKAC error is worth the slight inconvenience.

Finally, there are the things in Vista that I flat out don’t like or want there. First is of course, the implementation of DRM in the operating system. I’ve yet to see an application of DRM that I would consider valid, and refuse to buy a copy of Vista solely on this fact (though I obviously don’t mind playing with a free copy). Aero I’m not particularly fond of, though it can be disabled. Now, I don’t mind compositing in general, and if I had a computer that could run it smoothly, I’d probably even use Aero.

All in all, I’m not sure about Vista yet. If Microsoft wasn’t so damned anticompetitive and generally oppressive with their operating system, I’d be more inclined to use it alongside Linux, but at this point I’m just not sure.

For this process, you will need the following:

• A Linux host operating system (I used Ubuntu 7.04)
• rdesktop 1.5 or newer
• A virtualization product of some sort (I used VMWare Workstation 6)
• A copy of Windows capable of running an RDP server (I used Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition)

I’m assuming you already have your copy of Linux up and running, so I’m not going to bother talking about that. I’m also going to assume that you already have rdesktop installed (it was installed by default on Ubuntu 7.04).

In this case, the first step is going to be to install VMWare. At the time of writing, you can download a free copy of the Release Candidate of VMWare Workstation 6 from VMWare’s webpage. Download the .tar.gz and be sure to copy down the serial number they give you, or you will not be able to use Workstation. Extract the archive you’ve downloaded and install VMWare normally.

After you get VMWare installed and running, the next step is to install Windows inside of a virtual machine. This process is relatively simple, and shouldn’t give you any problems. If you encounter any difficulty installing VMWare or Windows, look elsewhere for support, because that’s not what this guide is about.

Now, start up your virtual machine and log in as Administrator (you specified the password for this account during installation). The first step is to create a limited user account for yourself so you aren’t always running as Administrator. Bring up the Start Menu, then right click on My Computer and go to Manage. When the Computer Management window appears, expand the Local Users and Groups item in the left hand column. Then, right-click on Users and then select New User. The dialog that appears is pretty self explanatory. Enter a user name, actual name, and password. Then be sure to uncheck “User must change password at next logon” and then select “Password never expires.”

Now you need to enable Remote Desktop. From the Start Menu, right-click on My Computer and select Properties.

• Switch to the “Remote” tab in the System Properties window
• Check the option “Enable Remote Desktop on this computer”
• Click on “Select Remote Users”
• Click “Add”
• Enter your username
• Click “Check Names”
• Click “OK”
• Click “OK” again to close out of the dialog

Now, Remote Desktop should be enabled and your user should have the proper permission to use it. To test this, open a terminal in your Linux operating system and run the command:

rdesktop servername

Where servername is the IP address of your virtual machine. If all goes well, a window will appear allowing you to login with your username and password, and then give you access to a Windows desktop session. Go ahead and exit out of the remote session for now.

Now we need to install SeamlessRDP onto the virtual machine. Download the SeamlessRDP .zip file from the SeamlessRDP homepage. Extract the contents of that archive somewhere on your server. For the sake of this guide, I’m going to extract it to “C:seamlessrdp”. In Windows Explorer, right-click the newly created directory “C:seamlessrdp” and select Properties. Go to security, click Add, and add the group “Remote Desktop Users” and click OK.

Now, we need to test SeamlessRDP. Again, open a terminal in your Linux OS and run the following command:

rdesktop -A -s “C:seamlessrdpseamlessrdpshell.exe notepad” servername

Just like before, it will ask you for your username and password. However, instead of showing you a new Windows session, it will return only a Notepad window, which will act and behave similarly to your normal application windows. Now, rdesktop supports several commandline options to redirect things like soun, disks, and even clipboard use from the remote session. However, adding all of these flags everytime you want to run a Windows application is tedious, so I’ve created a better solution, which is to use a script.

Start by making a script directory that we’ll add to your path. Open a terminal and do that following:

EDIT 6/18/08: This section of the post originally instructed you to download a small shell script that I had written.  Due to my server having to be reformatted, the file no longer exists, but it can be recreated.  Look at the rdesktop command above and read the rdesktop man page and you should be able to get it working.  Feel free to post a comment if you need additional help.

Now, open the downloaded script in a text editor, and fill in a couple values. Add your username after “LOGIN=” and the address of the server after “SERVER=”. By default, the value of PASSWD is “-”, which will prompt you for your password when running the script. You can replace it with your actual password and it won’t prompt you, but if anyone has access to this text file, they’ll be able to get your password from it.

Now, make the script executable by running “chmod +x seamless”, and then open your ~/.bashrc file for editing. At the end of the file, append the line:

PATH=~/bin:$PATH

You’ll have to open a new terminal window to reload your bashrc file, but once you do, you’ll be able to use seamless as a normal command. To use it, simply run “seamless program” from a terminal.

This script will do the following things: It will connect to the server, start the specified program, then connect your home directory to that program (which can be accessed via My Computer), redirect clipboard use to your clipboard so that you can copy and paste from Linux to Windows programs and vice-versa, and also redirect sound to your Linux OS so that you can play sound in your Windows applications.

Test it out by trying to launch a couple of built-in Windows applications:

• For Notepad:
  • seamless notepad
• For Paint:
  • seamless mspaint
• For Internet Explorer
  • seamless “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe”
• For Media Player:
  • seamless “C:Program FilesWindows Media Playerwmplayer.exe”
• For Outlook Express:
  • seamless “C:Program FilesOutlook Expressmsimn.exe”

Now, here’s what’s nice about VMWare workstation 6, and one of the reasons I chose to use it. If you close the VMWare window with Windows still running, it will ask you what to do. One of the options is to run the virtual machine in the background and close the window. By doing this, VMWare will close to the tray, but leave Windows running, so that the seamless script will still work just fine.

And now, I’ll leave you with a few screenshots of the end result of this process: (Warning: Pictures are large)