bobpeers -> blog

Like many people who are interested in IT one of my secondary functions is to help friends and family ‘fix’ their computers. Of course I’m happy to do this but sometimes problems just make me want to tear my hair out (I’m of course talking about Windows Vista here).

This time it was trying to fix a Toshiba Satellite U300 laptop running Vista Home Premium. The computer booted and reached the login screen but we couldn’t login. Every time a warning appeared saying something about the ‘SNES service could not log you in as the security token could not be found’.

I Googled for a solution and tried to fix it using sfc /scannow and a few other commands but nothing worked so rather than waste more time I decided to reinstall since there was no valuable data to loose.

The initial reinstall went fine (if very slowly) but soon after it all started to go wrong. Since the laptop is a couple of years old there were of course plenty of updates from Microsoft, I expected it to initially find Vista SP 1 but instead Windows Update found 73 other updates. I decided that it must know best (sometimes other updates are required before you can install a SP after all) but I was wrong.

About 2 hours and 3 reboots later the updates were installed but then the computer would not shutdown, it would just hang at the ‘Logging off’ screen and only a hard reset would turn it off. During the updates I knew a few system restore points must be created so I decided to roll back a few updates to see if I could pinpoint where it sent wrong. Unfortunately system restore stubbornly refused to fulfil it’s sole purpose, stopping with an error that ‘System restore could not complete the restore’ or something equally cryptic and useless.

There was nothing to do except for another reinstall. Except this time I downloaded the Vista SP1 Standalone file so I could force SP1 as the first update. Sure enough this worked fine, so the next time I rebooted I only had 3 updates from Windows Update to install.

With that out of the way I only had to remove the 10-15 bloatware applications installed by Toshiba (desktop sidebar gadgets for eBay and Amazon, DesktopSMS software etc etc…) and the laptop was as good as new!

The main points to come out of this are.

1. When Windows goes wrong it really goes wrong. Often it’s just not worth trying to fix the problem, rather just reinstall.
2. Windows Update needs to be a lot smarter.
3. Why the hell is Windows Update so slow. Download, install, reboot while updating, install some more…it just goes on and on. Can it really take 2 hours and 3 reboots to install 73 updates?
4. Microsoft Windows is a commercial product that often points to lack of Linux support as a major failing of Linux. But realistically how many people actually call Microsoft to fix their computer when their OS fails. I’m guessing the outside the US it’s not many, it’s left to friends and family to run MS support for free.
5. Why does Vista in particular make me feel like I’ve lost control of my computer. Everything seems so well hidden that when it works it’s OK but when it fails you’re on your own.

For sure the learning curve for Linux is steeper but it just does many things right.

1. Having not used my Fedora 10 system for a while it needed 131 updates the last time I booted it. Even on an old laptop this took about 40 minutes to complete with no reboots at all. When I did reboot, the system was just as stable as before.
2. Sure I’ve had a few problems but because everything is open and easy to find I can nearly always trace the problem and fix it myself. I’ve NEVER reinstalled the OS to fix a problem.
3. I have control of my computer, no clicking through license agreements whenever I update a program and no entering of license keys to check that I’m allowed to use the software.

I still enjoy the challenge of fixing other peoples computers but I’m wondering if I should charging Microsoft for my time!

Since my last post I’ve downloaded the Moblin v2.0 beta img file and installed the img using Virtualbox. It’s easy to install, just use the img file as you would a regular iso file so set Virtualbox to boot from the img file.

The only gotcha is to remember to enable PAE/NX in the general settings, I seem to forget this every time but the boot process stops early on with the warning. I’m also not sure how much space is required for the install but at my first attempts failed with the partitioner complaining that you must have at least 2500 MB for the root (/) partition, I’d say to allow at least 4GB in total.

For anyone that’s used Fedora and the Anaconda installer before it’s all very familiar stuff except for a few removed options (no encrypted partitions for example). The install took about 10 minutes at most.

Once rebooted we arrive at the start page, or m_zone as moblin call it.

I’ll not go into much detail as it’s described thoroughly on the Phoronix site and Ars Technica but here’s a few screen shots of the applications screen, nautilus and a terminal (no it’s not hidden away!).

Many applications are standard Gnome versions but with a modified theme and I think the GUI is very easy to use even to some one totally new to the interface.

Just to note that there seems to be no GUI to shutdown Moblin, instead open a terminal and use:

sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now

The user you created on install is added to the sudoers file so you can run this command by using your normal users password.

Generally it runs OK in Virtualbox, if very slowly, plus there are some issues with the screen resolution as you can see in the screen shots that the top menu becomes ‘squashed’ at the right side and the start screen actually goes of the edge of the screen.

Nautilus

Applications Display

Terminal

I just read that Intel has released a beta version of the Moblin OS for netbooks. This replaces XFCE used on the alpha release with the new Intel interface. I’ve yet to give it a try but I’ll post some screen shots when it’s running in VirtualBox.

Update – I’ve just realised that there are no VMWare images available for the beta as there were for the alpha, not a big deal but a bit more work to get going.

I’ve just tried out a lightbox plugin for jQuery, it’s called jQuery Lightbox Plugin (balupton edition) and despite the rather long title it’s very easy to use.

One of the main advantages I can see over other libraries is that you only need to create one link to the main JavaScript file, all the other links are handled by the code. This makes including the script much easier as there’s only one line to add in the document head

<script type="text/Javascript" src="/lightbox/js/jquery.lightbox.min.js"></script>

The only problem I experienced is that using the constructor crashes IE6, so using this code doesn’t work:

$(function(){$.Lightbox.construct({
          show_linkback: false
          });
});

Fortunately there’s a workaround by appending the options to the script link so it looks like this:

src="/lightbox/js/jquery.lightbox.min.js?show_linkback=false

Online RegEx Tool

I also ran across this online regular expression tester, it’s done in Flash but you can also download it to your computer if you have Abobe Air installed. It makes for a very handy tool on your desktop.

After my experiences with Google Android I decided to take Intels Moblin for a spin. Intel make it very easy to try Moblin out as they already provide a VMWare image on the main download page.

As it turns out using VMWare images in Virtualbox is a piece of cake as Virtualbox natively supports this format. Simply download the image from the website, then unpack the file (if you’re using Windows I highly recommend using 7-Zip, plus it’s GPL licensed) and save the vmdk file into your Virtualbox harddisks folder.

In Virtualbox you just use the vmdk file as as the new machines hard disk and off you go. I found Moblin booted very quickly and connected to the network without any problem. The desktop environment used is XFCE so you would expect good performance but in use I found it was extremely sluggish. Some mouse clicks took 20-30 seconds to register and I noted that the CPU used by Virtualbox hung at around 50% during this whole period. I suspect that this is a problem with Virtualbox and not Moblin but it’s hard to be sure.

Moblin is aimed mainly at the rapidly expanding netbook marked which Android may also be venturing into. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future in this field, especially with Windows 7 fighting over the same market (if Microsoft can maintain it’s profit margins that is).