bobpeers -> blog

This is more of a note to myself as I keep forgetting, but to start IIS (5.1 in my case) you just need type the following into a terminal.

net start w3svc

It seems that only a few weeks go by and Virtualbox release a new version. I had only just installed Windows 7 Beta into Virtualbox 2.10 (using the Vista option) when they released version 2.12 with support for Windows 7. Admittedly the code base for Windows 7 and Vista are very similar but just the fact that they get a release out so fast is very encouraging.

It’s really a good sign when a large company like Sun can get changes out of the door this fast and I think it bodes well for the future development of Virtualbox. I look forward to what’s the next step for Virtualbox as it’s already a fantastic product.

I was reading Linux Format Magazine when I read a letter referring to Crunchbang Linux. It’s essentially a lightweight, repackaged Ubuntu distribution but with Openbox as the window manager. It seems to have quite a few fans already and is moving up the Distrowatch popularity board rapidly.

I downloaded the iso file tonight so tomorrow I’ll install it into Virtualbox to give it a spin.

Even though I’m a Linux enthusiast I still thought I’d have a look at the new Windows 7 Beta that was released to the public on Saturday.

I should also say that I’m very pleased that Microsoft decided to lift the 2.5 million limit on the number of license keys available but can’t help but think the whole situation was planned. It was obvious that after saying the only 2.5 million keys will be available there would be a huge rush that would cripple the site and get huge publicity.

Apart from the initial server overload it went very well downloading the beta, I got both the 32 and 64 bit files downloaded in about 30 minutes so they must have got something right in the end.

I installed the 32 Bit version into Virtualbox, no need to screw up a ‘real’ computer these days. The procedure is very simple but installing the guest Additions needs a slight tweak, the clearest instructions I’ve found are on the Sun Blogs site.

On installing there was a long delay between the ‘Windows is extracting files..’ message and the next stage, I actually thought it had silently crashed but just be patient as it does work in the end.

As for my impressions, yes it’s slick, looks very nice and runs extremely well in my virtual machine, but coming from a Linux point of view it’s boring. I’m sure the masses will love it but I just feel that with each advancement it puts me one step further away from knowing what my computer is doing.

I also wonder why the 32 Bit iso is 2.6GB (and the 64 Bit is 3.15GB) when there’s virtually no software included (although paint has the ribbon interface, woo hoo!). The Fedora 10 iso is 3.5GB but includes GIMP, OpenOffice, MySQL, Apache, Perl and thousands of other packages out of the box. Why Windows should be so large is a total mystery to me.

I also wonder about the small things, Windows 7 Beta still seems to have the same notepad that’s been around since Windows 1.0. Search Google and you find thousands of hits for notepad replacements (I use Notepad++) and yet Microsoft didn’t bother upgrading the one shipping with their flagship product, strange.

My girlfriends mother has just got a new (old) laptop. It’s a business laptop that’s a few years old, a Lenovo Thinkpad T43p to be precise. I’ve read lots about Thinkpads but never actually used one for any length of time before but there’s a few things I quickly noticed.

1. This model has a 14.1″ SXGA+ screen running at 1400×1050 and the quality is fantastic, incredibly sharp and clear. Even though it’s only 14.1″ you feel as though you have plenty of space. Many 14″ laptops run at 1280×800 or less (like my HP 6930p) which I find rather limiting.
2. Build quality is superb, it feels as though it will last a lifetime.
3. Great keyboard, easy to type on right from first use (although the lack of a Win key and the Fn key placement is very hard to adjust to).
4. This model had a Intel Pentium M 760 / 2 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and a standard 80GB 5400rpm disk but felt very fast and responsive in everyday use. It felt much faster than I expected it to.

Along with the genuinely useful Lenovo software available I’ll definitely consider buying a Lenovo myself in future. I know that Linux runs fine on them and with them being a staple of many large businesses they get a lot of people installing Linux so the web has plenty of sources of help with Linux on Lenovo laptops.

I’ve just tried VirtualBox 2.10 and their support for Fedora hosts has much improved. In the past I had problems running Fedora 10 in full screen mode due to Xorg 1.5 being shipped with Fedora 10. Now it works flawlessly along with the dynamic resizing and mouse capture support.

The main problem I still have is with seamless mode. When I tried this out I could only see a small patch of the client in a window in the middle of my host desktop so I was unable to even shutdown the machine.

I was running VirtualBox on a laptop with a P8600 2.4 GHz processor and 2GB or RAM, I allocated 768MB of RAM to the Fedora client and it actually runs much faster than natively on my old laptop with 512MB of RAM. In fact with it running full screen you would not know that it was not the host OS as it runs so well.

With many laptops now shipping with 4GB of RAM I can easily see the time when there’s no need to set up a dual boot environment but just use virtualisation instead. The main problem is with hardware support, for example accessing built in webcams and other laptop specific devices.

Update – I just tried seamless mode again and it worked perfectly so maybe the problem was an intermittent one, I hope so anyway.