Ξ March 31st, 2007 | → 9 Comments | ∇ Tech |
A friend asked me to look at her computer to see if I could fix. There wasn’t anything in particular wrong with it, but it was running Windows and had enough miscellaneous little issues that, to me, warranted a rebuild of the system. Since this is something I do many times a day at work, I have the whole process of re-installing Windows down to an art and could almost do it in my sleep. However, since I was doing this for a friend and not for work, there are a few things I had to do differently. For instance, I don’t have access to nifty imaging backup software, so I was doing this the old fashioned way… Manually back up all the data, take notes of the user settings, format, install, download drivers, etc, etc…
Now, I should know better than to trust Microsoft to make a reliable solution for preserving a user’s profile upon a system rebuild, but in my laziness I decided to try out Windows XP’s built in “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard”. I had used this tool a few times at work in the past, but have since become accustomed to Norton Ghost and other solutions for dealing with this. I ran the wizard, backed up all the Documents and Settings to an archive on my Linux server and proceeded to format the machine, re-install Windows, all the drivers and third-party software, millions of Windows updates and got the system running and looking pretty smooth.
When I was satisfied that the system was running nicely, I went to the nice “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard” and told it to restore all the files and settings from the archive that it created on my server.
“Your migration store was created with a previous version of Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. Please collect your settings using the current version of the Files and Settings Transfer wizard.”
What?! It was seriously telling me that I need to go back and re-create the archive with a newer version of the software. Unfortunately this is not possible, as there is no more data to recreate the archive from. I don’t think I could have felt more anger towards Microsoft at this point.
Since I didn’t want to inform my friend that although her computer is now “fixed”, I lost all of her data, and since I have been doing Windows builds for a while now and never lost any data before, I was determined to work through this. A little bit of googling led me in the right direction: One specific Windows patch (KB896344) updated the software and for some unknown reason made it incompatible with its own data.
So I uninstalled the responsible Windows update, which by the way broke most of the other Windows components, like Internet Explorer 7 (Don’t even get me started on that one…). But after a restart, I was able to restore all of the data. Now that the data was back on the machine, I still had to fix all the things that broke by uninstalling that update. My first thought was to run Windows Update again to re-install the patch. Well this was no longer possible, since IE didn’t work at all anymore. So I had to fire up Firefox, navigate to the Microsoft Support site, download the patch, install it (which only gave a few errors and IE still didn’t work). Then I had to uninstall IE7 from Add/Remove Programs, fire up IE6, run Windows Updates (2 or 3 restarts later) and re-install IE7. 3 days later than expected and many restarts later, the machine is back up and running with no problems. My advice: Stay away from Windows!
Ξ March 26th, 2007 | → 7 Comments | ∇ Tech |
It turns out that all the Justin Dows in the world aren’t as geeky as I am, since I am the first to snag the new address of this blog: http://justindow.com . The old domain is still there and I’ll be using it for some other things in the future, but the http://dowhaus.com/blog/ URL should redirect to here. Please let me know if there are any problems with your links or your feed readers.
Here is a list of some of my favorite quotes from some of my favorite movies:
1. “That one goes there, THAT one goes there!”
2. “You talking to me? Well I’m the only one here.”
3. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?”
4. “Someday - and that day may never come - I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”
5. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
6. “Medium-dry Vodka Martini… Shaken, not stirred.”
7. “Say ‘hello’ to my little friend!”
8. “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
9. “You’ll shoot your eye out!”
10. “There’s, another example. See, here I’m now by myself, uh, er, talking to myself. That’s, that’s chaos theory.”
Can anyone guess which movies they come from? One hint: No two quotes are from the same movie.
Unfortunately, this is my life:
Keeps me busy between Windows crashes at work, though…
Thanks, xkcd!
Ξ March 10th, 2007 | → 4 Comments | ∇ Tech |
Well in the last year or so, I have been able to find a Linux replacement for almost every single task that I use a computer for. I’ve even learned of many new apps that I didn’t know about before, but now can’t seem to live without. Lately, though, there has been one particular issue that I have been trying to find a solution for. Since I tend to travel to Europe form time to time, I like to be able to keep in touch with people back home. Skype seems to do the trick for most things, however there are some things that bother me about it, particularly their lack of a decent Linux client. They don’t support any video calls for Linux yet. I started to research alternatives, and found some promising stuff, like WengoPhone. It seems like an ideal solution to everything, but so far testing has yielded minimal results, as I haven’t, as of yet, been able to successfully place a call to my mom using voice, let alone video. I will keep them in the back of my mind for the future, but I think they are still in their alpha stage of development on their 2.0 version, which looks to be a very promising open-source Skype replacement that is cross-platform.
I purchased a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX, keeping my fingers crossed and return postage handy, because I had no idea if it would work under Linux but I figured I would just take a chance. Well, I must say that I was completely shocked to open the package, plug it in and open up Kopete to see myself staring back at me. Props to Logitech for that one. So now that I had a working webcam with 100% less effort than installing the same device in Windows (requires driver CD or download, a few minutes of intstallation time and a reboot or two), I was ready to test out Kopete’s video chat features and attempted to connect to someone using MSN Messenger, which seems to have pretty nice Video Call features. This tried to work, but I think my über-restrictive firewall wasn’t allowing something to go through, so I canned that idea. Gaim unfortunately doesn’t support any video or voice stuff, and I didn’t want to try to convince everyone I know to start using SIP-based VOIP clients, because that is just another hassle for the non-computer-savvy folks in my life, and my goal is to be able to connect to them with all the effort on my end, since I am the computer geek.
So I had an interesting thought. My webcam works under Linux. I have an old Windows virtual machine floating around on my hard drive that I haven’t booted up in a while. Let’s see if my webcam will work inside of VMware and whether I can successfully call my girlfriend using Windows Messenger or Skype, since that is what she uses.
Step 1: Download VMware Server, register for a license, and install by un-tarring the tarball and running vmware-config.pl. I just accepted all defaults. Look for it on ubuntuguide.org. There are some dependencies like a C compiler and stuff. I’ll try not to get too distro-specific here, but for the record, I am using Kubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10
Step 2: Install Windows XP in Virtual Machine. This requires you to buy a license from Microsoft. If you don’t have one, I would recommend finding a different way to do video calls under Linux. Don’t buy Windows just for this reason.
Step 3: Install VMware Tools. Reboot the VM.
Step 4: Turn off VM and edit the settings and make sure that you install the USB controller and an audio device. Turn VM back on.
Step 5: Once the VM boots up, go to the VM menu>Removable Devices>USB Devices and select the webcam. Windows will detect the webcam and you can install the software for it (Note: the first time I did this, I had to shut it down and close VMware Server and re-open it before it worked.) Installing the logitech software requires a reboot.
That was pretty simple. The camera includes a built-in microphone, which also worked and I was able to install a virtual sound card in the machine, so that I could get sound. Both Windows Live Messenger and Skype worked almost flawlessly inside the virtual machine. And I was able to call my girlfriend and have a video chat without booting into Windows or messing with my firewall. Of course this is a huge roundabout way to achieve a small task, but I am very impressed that it works. Hopefully I can find a nice full featured open-source IM client that will do video with no hassle soon, but until then I have one last reason to keep the old VM around and have now made it unnecessary to ever boot into the Windows partition on my hard drive again.
