RPG Articles

So I’m installing Vista Home Basic for a client. This is my first time doing it, so I figured I’d record my thoughts here. I mean, Vista is crap, let’s not think for a second that’ll change, but I’m willing to give a fair shake to the install process.

Currently I’m staring at the default sort of borealis looking background and a mouse cursor. There appears to be some activity.

As an aside, I don’t know why SMART is disabled by default in so many boards.

There we go. About 4 minutes of waiting for the first step of the installer.

Second “step” is just a “What you should know before taking it deep in the pooper” and “Let Windows fail to repair your computer”. Naturally these are just my cynical translations.

Now waiting some more. About 3 minutes to get to the product key entry screen.

Waiting again. “Only” about a minute to bring up the license agreement, which I already accepted, apparently, by opening the cd package.

Haha. Now we have two options. Upgrade, which is greyed out because this is a new drive, or “Custom(advanced)” which is just a clean install.

There looks like some driver loading options on the disk screen, which is a step up from frantically hitting F6. Now moving on to “Installing Windows”.
About 10 minutes on that screen, now rebooting.

Preparing to start for the first time. Thankfully that only took a few seconds. Now we’re “completing installation”. This appears to be a hardware detection routine, judging from the screen blanking. Now a black screen, at first with a mouse cursor, but now just black. Looks like the monitor has lost signal. I… can only assume that something has gone awry. I think 3 minutes is long enough, time to reset.

Alrighty then. Now we’re at the account creation screen. A few more basic settings. Now Windows is “checking the computer’s performance”. Christ this seems like a waste of time. Thank goodness this is an advanced install, where this sort of thing is skippable…. oh.

Coming up on 10 minutes of this performance check.

Well. Over 30 minutes of that, let’s see if resetting will skip it. We will be bold and select “Start Windows Normally”.

It’s forced me back to the “create a user” section, even though apparently the user I made is already there. Off to the races? No. I’m staring at the background, no cursor or icons, watching it flog the hard drive.

Keep in mind, this a pretty good workstation. 2GB of RAM, DDR2 800, and a 2.4GHz dual core AMD. Thankfully it seems to have skipped the performance shit this time.

Man. That was unacceptable. Wastes of time everywhere, and very little benefit. The only improvement, in real terms, is the driver section for storage. That’s literally it.

So, I decided to upgrade to 8.04, from 7.10, and to also move to 64bit. Went with a clean install, mostly to eradicate all the weird things I had done with my previous profile.

Anyway, thus far it’s great. Firefox 3 Beta 5 is the default browser, and it mostly works very well. Fonts look a lot nicer in it. I didn’t even realize how crapulent they really were before until seeing the new renderer. I like the unlock mechanism for control panels, even if it did take me a few minutes to notice what was going on. The idea of Gnome VFS is nice, but we’ll see.

There are some issues I’ve had. One is that while copying things my open apps would hang in time rather frequently. I can only imagine that’s because of something in the VFS system. I’m hoping it was a fluke, due to some indexing going on, or will be patched soon. Moving files, however, is lightning fast, even compared to regular linux cases. This says quite a bit, since linux just changes pointers on the filesystem when a “move” is made, making the normal operation rather fast already. Skype is still a bunch of slackers, with not 64 bit version to show. Undoubtedly we’ll have to wait through 6 revisions of the Windows client before another update worth a damn shows up. From a straight architecture point of view, memory intense apps, like Virtualbox virtual machines, run a lot faster than before. I’m not sure why this is, since I only have 2GB of RAM, plus whatever is on my video card, but it’s nice.

So, thus far, thumbs up.

This is something I just setup for a client of mine, whose company processes payroll and taxes. I honestly don’t know the full extent of what ATX does, but here’s what I do know- It’s written in Java, yet is platform dependent. That’s quite common with this sort of thing, and I don’t know why, but it’s a good sign that the software blows.

Anyway. Looked fairly reasonable, overall, but would stall out sometimes because of Java’s magic. Overall, didn’t really look at it enough to tell you anything beyond it’s as poorly laid out as any super industry specific software.

ATX Scan & Fill was something I had to install. It let’s you scan documents in, such as invoices and W2s, and save those under client profiles.

First, I looked for an option to import clients from ATX. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But no, nothing there. Thankfully he only has like 5 clients in the system currently, but still.

Next I tried to add a client. This took some time, because it just had a “Create new folder” option, which turned out to be it. I imagine it’s rather a pain in the ass to work with, based on my small sample. Supposedly you can scan W2s, and similar structured forms, and it’ll use OCR to fill in the electronic info from that. Aside from that there is literally no reason to use it.

Why? Because in ATX, when you click the option to import from Scand & Fill, it’ll let you browse to any image you want. Sure, it supports some search parameters, and the fill option, but it’s something to bear in mind if you don’t want to buy them both right off the bat.

Wow. This thing is cool. It’s a tool for copying and restoring partitions. You can use it across a network or locally. I just finished imaging a 15GB partition, with just over 10GB of data on it, in about half an hour or so. This is the medium option, which uses gzip for compression, and the resulting image size is just under 6.5GB.

Not too shabby at all.

So, lately I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how awesome Arch Linux is, and figured I’d try it out. The iso was downloaded, and a virtual machine created.

Step 1- Download. The iso is about 158MB, which is rather small, which is typically a good thing if you’re looking to be up and running quickly.

Step 2- Boot and install. Using VirtualBox I mounted the iso and booted from it. Install is menu driven and pretty straightforward. I was expecting more packages selectable during the install, but looking back I probably should have tried a net-install for that. Still, I miss the package selection in FreeBSD’s installer. OpenSuSE ain’t bad on this score, though I’m not fond of Novell, which keeps me at arms length on it.

EDIT- I forgot to mention that one sticking point, for anyone that isn’t familiar with linux at a fundamental level, is that the installer refuses to use any sort of script interface to write changes to the core config files, and instead gives you a list of them, which you can then select items from the edit in either nano or vim. Now, it’s a nice list, and you really shouldn’t have to change much beyond the network configuration, but it’s an unnecessary pain in the butt.

Step 3- Packages. The vbox rebooted and brought up a functional CLI system. Arch uses pacman for installing and managing software. The arguments for pacman, as compared to yum or even slapt, are a little odd to me. For instance, pacman -S <package name> installs a package, while pacman -Ss <search string> searches the repository for that string. Thankfully the Arch Linux website has excellent documentation.

Sooo… what do I think about it? Well, it’s rather nice for a traditional distro. Low BS all the way around and decent package management with a horde of fresh packages. If you were looking to setup a bunch of identical, more or less single role workstations, you could easily build up one system just so and image it, with no clutter. Or, if you were looking to build up a server and had a specific vision for the packages it would run, also a good option.

Think Slackware with up to date packages, and a package manager built in. Plus honest to gHod documentation, instead of 4 year old crib notes on how OSS is the one true sound or somesuch.

If you’re just an old-school loonix nut, then you’re probably already using it and hating Ubuntu.

So, I was trying to blog on my Movable Type install, just trying it out some, and… the damned thing doesn’t work. The package is making invalid links. So, uh, screw that.

Movable Type = Waste of time. Use WordPress. The two are similar enough in the good places, and WP is much better designed everywhere else.

So, in order to briefly distract myself from what I can only assume is epic depression, I decided to install Mediawiki and Movable Type to expand my interweb knowledges.

Mediawiki is a lot like WordPress, so that went easily. Haven’t gotten to customizing it yet, but doesn’t look difficult. Made the directory, started the upload, created the database and a db user for it, set execute permissions for the config directory, ran the install script, followed directions, all very easy.

Movable type struck me as flawed from the getgo. I don’t care for web installs that rely on the cgi bin, and MT is all about the cgi bin. To me, this indicates an approach from older web standards. Also, while not as bad as the majority of blog packages I’ve seen, there seem to be a lot of files for the relatively simple task it’s approaching. Anyway, aside from somewhat less pleasing install documentation, it went rather smoothly.

Later I’ll actually try them out and comment on their functionality.

I’m not someone who used to hate Windows. I mean, 3.11 and even 95 failed to do much for me, being just various layers over DOS, but 98 was none too shabby. I played with BSDs and Linuxes, but they required a lot more investment in learning to get running well, plus I was SOL on games, which was, and largely is, the only reason to own a computer at all.

NT is dookie. If you don’t agree, then you’re wrong. 100% wrong. You probably like the Phunk Junkees, that’s how wrong you are.

Anyway. 2000 was, and is, pretty good. Didn’t have a lot of game support when it first spun around, so I never ran it at home, but I worked (and still work) with it a lot, and it’s not bad. Not as good as something designed for the jobs it takes on, but not bad. 2003, more of the same, with a delicate balance of oddball limitations and administrative candy. Not enough for me to separate it out from 2k in this bitch session though.

ME… see the NT comments.

Along rolled XP into my life. It was pretty, the start menu was pretty ok, the common tasks thing was nice, and compared to 98 it was pretty stable. I rolled XP for a long, long time. Since it came out, to whenever the hell I switched to Ubuntu this year. Over time XP just got weird. Every patch and update added some little hellish thing. SP1 fixed a lot of stuff, but dicked with a bunch of little things, that didn’t seem related. After SP1, I had to specify a DNS or Unreal Tournament would run slow. I’m not kidding. SP2 did marginally fewer fixes and changed the rules on a lot of drivers, boning a lot of people. Security center bugs the crap out of me, and it should bother anyone that isn’t a slack jaw. Suddenly a lot of my older games wouldn’t run, or would run poorly after days of screwing with settings. UPnP would slow down network access until totally disabled, and would do so on other Windows machines on the network. MS Messenger had its own version of UPnP that had to be disabled separately, which was fun. The QoS stuff in the TCP stack, so far as I know, has never been implemented, making you wonder why the hell it’s even listed. But hey, progress, right? A lot of this stuff is resolved by now, right? You’d think so. Then I see stuff that’s been a problem since, I believe NT, like vanishing optical devices, both real and virtual. Caused by a truly retarded mechanism where cd burning software can hook into the cd driver directly, as a layered service provider. What’s that mean? Means if you uninstall the software, or the software flakes out, your optical drives all disappear. That’s the official story, but truly I’ve seen it happen on stock installs too. Not for a while though, so I thought it fixed, so today I slammed my head against this until finally calling a truce until tomorrow. The fix? Delete a registry value. Specifically Upper and Lower filters.

So. Yeah.

Now, I know, what about Vista? I keep saying I’ll install it on a machine to test it out, but that’s not going to happen. I have to work on a few Vista machines, and that’s all the contact I want with the thing. It’s slow to do most anything, the majority of the menus and panels are irritating, and the MS idea of an accelerated desktop is laughable. Oh, and most of your programs won’t work, or will half assedly. Most may be an exaggeration, but it’s pretty bad.

I regard Windows users now the same way I do people that still use OS 9 or earlier, which is to say “What the hell are you running that for??”.

That should actually read “sort of”. The new driver, which I just tried out, offers a lot better support of my crapesque Radeon x1600. Doubled my glxgears FPS, increased 2D desktop acceleration noticeably, and, in theory, allows the use of compiz without XGL, aka, the crappy x server.

While compiz would run, and wasn’t crushingly slow, it was too slow to use. Still, I wouldn’t have retreated from the driver if that’s all that was going on, because seriously, the extra 2D acceleration was very nice. The real trouble was when I went to test a game under wine. Screen would go black, and the cursor would change, then the video would go completely away. Too bad, since it sounded like it was cranking away faster. But, it makes me hopeful that ATI is finally getting its act together on the linux front.

So, ATI bit me in the ass again. I decided to update from Feisty to Gutsy today, and my working just fine, direct rendering ATI setup went kablooey. There was apparently some customized XGL stuff in Feisty (aka- hacks), that was corrected in Gutsy, but led to this issue here because of the malformed configs from Feisty. Make sense? No? Good, that means you’re paying attention.

Anyway. I just finished a clean install to a drive my roommate had given me. Installed, as per normal, and unlike Feisty everything just worked well once I enabled the restricted driver. So, hurrah.

Now to copy the important stuff from my home directory. And skip installing the MS Core fonts. This looks a lot better. I’ll just cram that junk into wine.