Vista, take 2

Well, yesterday's install of Vista Business solved the problem of getting Bibliofile to install its basic module. However, the support staff at TLC neglected to mention that the real incompatibility issue was with the PostgreSQL backend which for some reason they don't care to explain does not work under Vista. I can't tell if they mean that the two-versions-out-of-date Postgres 8.1.4 bundled in the Bibliofile installer is incompatible with Vista or if whatever glue code connecting Postgres to Bibliofile is incompatible (edit: it's the PG installer for 8.1.4 that's to blame). When I asked a TLC tech if it would be possible to manually upgrade the instance of Postgres to a more current version, he reacted as if I was planning to pour ketchup all over the inside of the laptop.

Our solution so far has been to repartition the HD and install XP to the second partition as a dual-boot system: when TLC manages to solve their problem, Vista's partitioning tool can reclaim the XP partition. Note to Microsoft: as much as I hate you, I have to admit a live partitioning tool that works inside its own boot partition is cool.

This decision required a fair amount of research: Toshiba technically supports XP, but doesn't go out of its way to announce how that works. However, forums are full of Satellite owners who have needed to downgrade to XP, and many have done their homework to find the XP drivers for the laptop's chipsets. After much searching and downloading, we think we've got the basics.

Interestingly while Vista correctly shrunk its own partition, the remaining free space wasn't correctly detected by the XP installer -- so we're formatting it NTFS as the E: drive and then trying again.

Update: Reformatting without the quick option and then reinstalling XP worked. What wasn't working correctly is the EasyBCD bootloader: the opening screen that shows you your boot choices didn't appear. According to the instructions above, you're supposed to install XP into the new partition, restart, see a corruption error, boot the Vista install disc to repair the installation and then everything will boot into Vista by default until you install EasyBCD and restart.

What happened was the Vista disc repaired the MBR, EasyBCD was installed, and when we booted into XP suddenly there was almost no space left on the partition despite no directories being full enough to account for it. Only the manual chkdsk /f was able to see what was corrupt and required us to start chkdsk on the next startup. chkdsk fixed the error, but we noticed that from this point onward the machine booted directly into the XP partition (which disk management shows as the boot partition) without showing the EasyBCD screen. Edit: it turned out that I had misread part of EasyBCD's config screen and set BCD to point directly to E: instead of the bootloader in C:. Once this was corrected it was fine.

We've got most of the XP drivers in and running, but the FN key does nothing in conjunction with the other keys. Sound works fine, ATI Catalyst drivers detect the 1200x800 screen, USB works (although it seems to think none of the ports are USB 2.0), and of course Bibliofile installed correctly.

Edit: had I paid more attention to the fact that the bundled restore DVD was labeled "A210/A215" and googled A210, I would have noticed that the A210 and the A215 appear to be nearly identical machines excepting that A210s are sold in Canada with only XP preinstalled and A215 are sold in the US with only Vista preinstalled. A210s are with one exception invisible on the US Toshiba support site. Visiting the Canadian Toshiba support site, I found all the XP driver software. A terrible audio stuttering problem was the result not of a wrong audio driver, but the wrong hotkeys driver, which was spiking 17% CPU usage at times. Uninstalling the hotkeys driver and installing the correct one resolved this problem. At this point, the only things not working are XP recognizing blank DVD media (it thinks it's CD media) and the multimedia keys along the top (which AFAIK are the same on the A210). Sound, video, wireless all fine in XP.

What I loved about Vista:

• Built-in live repartitioning tool capable of growing and shrinking its own partition. It leaves GNU parted in the dust.
  
• When it saw our Mythbox on the network, it immediately recognized it as a media server (with its own special icon) and begged us to install WMP and codecs to connect to it (which our time-tightened priorities did not allow).

What I liked about Vista:

• It has a filesystem which is starting to look more and more like *nix ones: /Users/yourname at the top of the root directory instead of /Documents and Settings/yourname.
• The search box allows you to enter commands.

What I hated about Vista:

• Fiscally separating power users from regular users. I don't give a flying fuck what the EU said, this wasn't necessary, and if I wasn't in a position to get Business on a university discount I'd be calling a class action ambulance chaser by now.
• UAC: the implementation, not the idea. OS X and Ubuntu require you to enter a password (which can be enough security on a publicly used box set to login without password at startup), and AFAIK set a cookie to remember you've authenticated for the next five minutes or so. A button which says "Do you really want to do this" over and over isn't security, it's Microsoft asking you to turn off the feature.
  

I fucking hate Microsoft

Ruth catalogs for a small Canadian concern. The application they use is Bibliofile, a specialized cataloging app which runs as a frontend to the PostgreSQL database. Bibliofile, during installation, creates a background user which does not appear in your menu of login choices. Post-installation, you have to reset the password and change it to never expire. Again, this user does not appear in the regular User Accounts list and must be managed through advanced methods.

In Windows XP, this is done by going into the User Accounts control panel, clicking the Advanced tab, then clicking the Advanced button under Advanced user management. The Local Users and Groups console appears, you expand the Users folder, select the Bibliofile user, right-click to reset the password, then right-click again to get Properties, tick 'Password never expires', click OK, close the console and you're done. Three minutes, max.

XP had two versions; XP Home and XP Pro, and the chief difference between them was the complexity of the networking abilities. Managing users and groups was available to both.

Vista has four versions: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. Local Users and Groups is only available to Business and Ultimate. The Toshiba Satellite Ruth got from Best Buy ships with Home Premium -- and upgrading to Ultimate costs $159.

Vista: testing the waters; repair installs on XP SP2

This weekend, Ruth's laptop died. A refurb Dell Latitude D800 bought nearly six years ago, it refused to stay powered on Sunday night and I spent much of yesterday morning swapping the HD into my smaller, less powerful Latitude C610 and doing the Repair Install boogie to get it to work there.

This was a short term solution to allow her to continue working from home, and we needed a laptop for her that had a warranty and a future. Best Buy had a floor clearance model which we snapped up and they are in the process of stripping out the crapware and optimizing it for her -- and it runs Vista. We'll see how this goes.

The other point to this blog entry is a piece of advice for people who have to do repair installs on XP SP2 (e.g. you're transplanting a boot drive into a new PC): if you've installed IE7, you're going to have problems with Microsoft Update after the repair install. Windows Update/Microsoft Update depend on a working version of IE, and the standard repair install will hose IE by partially replacing it with IE6 but not to the point of actually working. MS recommends uninstalling IE7 before doing the repair install, but honestly if you have to do a repair install chances are you can't do that.

Do the standard repair install procedure. After it's done and the system reboots to the point that you can use the desktop, open Firefox/Opera and go to the Microsoft site to download the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers. Run it and let it install all of SP2. Sit and watch it, it has some prompts. Reboot when it asks you to.

At this point you still don't have a viable IE, so go back to the Microsoft site and grab the IE7 installer. Run it and reboot.

At this point you'll have a working instance of IE and therefore Windows Update/Microsoft Update will work (and then it will need to install all the patches that came out after SP2). After this you should have a working XP SP2.

In our case there was another step: Office quietly detected that the hardware had changed since it was last run (remember, the HD was swapped into another PC) and it demanded the Office install CD to be happy. We did and all was good.

Using network shares as the default Documents folders in Ubuntu

Background: in our corporate environment, we have mapped our work PCs' default locations for MyFiles, My Videos, My Pictures and My Music to a network share which is subdivided by usernames' first letter and then the username itself. The objective here is to get Ubuntu Gutsy to do the same thing just as seamlessly.

While Gutsy has a "Connect to server" functionality very similar in appearance to OS X's, its actual method of connection (GnomeVFS) is not a true mount and therefore not visible to the Linux filesystem, making it impossible to link local directories to specific subdirectories of shares. This how-to explains the basics of permanently mounting a Samba share and replacing the pertinent user directories with links to the equivalent directories on that share.

Caveat: this is aimed at desktop users. Laptop users are strongly advised to create a separate account on their laptop beforehand as outside their corporate environment they may have to VPN/PPTP authenticate before they can access network shares.

Install smbfs support

This will make your system compatible with the Samba/CIFS filesystems. If you have installed Samba file sharing for your folders, this is not the same thing and you'll still need to do the above.

Create authentication credentials

sudo nano /root/.cifsconnect and add the following lines:

Save and close out.

Create a mount point for your share

Name it after your server (why will become clear soon):
sudo mkdir /media/corporateshares

Make Ubuntu automatically mount shares after login

sudo nano /etc/fstab and add the following line at the bottom
//corpshareurl/toplevelshare /media/corporateshares cifs credentials=/root/.cifsconnect 0 0
Note it says 'cifs' and not 'smbfs'. This is because smbfs won't grant you write/delete access. Log out and back in again. You should now have a corporateshares icon on your desktop. Unlike Windows and OS X, smbfs can't mount subdirectories below the actual share, and in our case our personal directory is below that share.

Recreate Documents/Pictures/Videos/Music

Open up your Home folder and drag your Pictures, Videos, and Music folders to the Desktop so their contents don't get deleted. Right-click and remove their entries from the Nautilus sidebar.

In Terminal, do the following:


This puts symlinks in where those folders used to be. If you didn't move those folders beforehand, you'll get an error. Now, drag the new Videos/Music/Pictures/Documents folders to the Nautilus sidebar.

Now reboot your system into Linux to make sure all the settings took.