Double tuners finally working

There are a lot of blind roads I got led down trying to figure this one out. To recap: Master backend in living room, slave backend in bedroom, PVR-150 in each. MBE refuses to see tuner in SBE, SBE refuses to see tuner in SBE.

Part of problem is related to both boxes defining tuner card as /dev/video0 which confuses MBE's database (not sure why). Googling 'force /dev/video1' was a mistake because the solutions to that had to do with boxes with multiple tuners, not ecologies with multiple tuners in separate boxes, and udev rules won't really fix my problem because they're more useful to fixing which device inside a box gets enumerated first.

No, what I needed was to tell the MBE that it was /dev/video1 and let the SBE stay /dev/video0. This isn't done with /etc/udev/rules.d/ rules files, this is done in /etc/modprobe/aliases with a simple line:

options ivtv ivtv_first_minor=1

Much, much easier than futzing with udev. The next step is to follow these instructions: Delete all the tuners on both boxes, set up the tuner on the SBE first (Mythbuntu deliberately doesn't have a menu option for mythtv-setup, so you'll have to run it from a terminal), then set up the tuner on the MBE. Nota Bene: you will not see the SBE tuner in the list of tuners as you create the MBE tuner. Do not freak.

Now, I have two machines which can simultaneously show separate live TV feeds, and the MBE automatically reshuffled the recording schedule to permit simultaneous recordings on both boxes. Amusingly the two tuners are known as 2 and 3 globally and each is Tuner 1 locally.

The remaining PITA at this point has to do with the audio on the new MBE: neither the VIA 82xx chipset nor the ancient Creative card I put in it allow Myth to control the volume, despite GNOME being able to do so. But the dual tuner situation has been a major victory.

Further improvements and fixes

After years of unsuccessfully trying to have the Myth backend transcode its MPEG2 recordings (provided by the Hauppauge PVR-150's onboard MPEG2 encoder chip) down to H.264 MPEG4s which consume only a quarter the disk space, I finally managed it.

The key seems to be not using any of the default Transcoder profiles and creating a new one which is specifically MP4 based; the two Autodetect ones don't do what I expected them to and the Low-Medium-High are RTJPEG rather than MP4 (the anal retentive in me refuses to change their definition).

Commercial detection is good; what I expected was that once a recording was commercial flagged, it would automatically insert cutpoints for future DVD export. This is not the case, but if I watch a flagged recording and hit M to edit it, once in the editor hitting Z imports the commercial flagpoints as cutpoints. Sweet.

The slave backend in the bedroom does not automatically configure itself to find the videos on the MBE; however, once NFS was configured for both boxes, the slave backend's ftab now mounts the MBE's ~/ at startup and the SBE's videos directory is pointed at it.

The master backend's media settings now include /media as a directory, so that CDs/DVDs/USB sticks with standard format videos can be recognized by Myth's video player. Irritatingly, Myth still has to be told to scan the media, and incomprehensibly does not filter out files outside the list of allowed media file extensions. It also does not purge the scans when the media is removed.

Burning shows to Memorex DVD+R single layer media has had spotty results: two DVDs made with Mytharchive have reported success, but had major bad sectors resulting in unplayability. Both were exported again as DVDs using identical settings successfully (as far as I can tell from casual scanning). I don't know if Myth is doing a crap job of verifying the media.

A problem since the box swap with Mythdvd not playing discs was resolved when the udev rules for optical media were discovered to have added the new box's optical drive but not removed the old one, effectively removing /dev/dvd from the device tree. Commenting out the old one and rebooting fixed this and Myth's default DVD player now works again.

Tuner card and audio card problems are still on the "to be fixed" list.

More myth nonsense

The ability of Myth to burn DVDs quietly disappeared some time back and more recently for people using the Medibuntu repository. Apparently several ffmpeg-related libraries in Intrepid no longer work with Medibuntu's version of ffmpeg, and alternates had to be installed to get it to work.

I had foolishly believed that the PVR-150s could not capture closed-captioning based on several forum posts, when I tripped across something which pointed out that NTSC-capable tuners are legally required to decode this VBI information. As it so happens, all I had to do was go into Myth's preferences and tell it from now on to capture VBI CC. On this note, the maintainers should point their caption fonts at the default install's fonts directory instead of copying just two fonts to the Mythtv directory.

The bedroom slave backend needs to have its tuner assigned to something other than /dev/video0 in order to avoid conflicting with the master backend's tuner, but supposedly once this is done the MBE should be able to tune while recording.

Nota Bene for people swapping out PCs in Myth systems

In the past I've gotten away with swapping out HDs from Linux systems to newer PCs. After the most recent swap, I noticed two things stopped working: sound volume and DVD playback in Myth's internal player. Checking the settings between the troubled backend and the slave backend did me no good; they were identical.

What had happened with the DVD was that /dev/dvd wasn't being created properly at boot. Error messages reading "can't stat /dev/dvd" turned up a search which led to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules, the config file which describes your optical drives' default /dev/ creation. Another blogger had discovered that replacing his optical drive did not automagically bring everything up to snuff; another set of rules were added but the previous set of rules were not deleted.

I haven't nailed down the audio problem yet, but I suspect it's similar. Edit: Apparently this is a problem with Intrepid and the onboard VIA 82xx audio chipset driver. I'll be experimenting with an audio card to see what I can do there.

Mythbuntu notes

Recently I came into possession of some used PCs from a medical practice which were built by the office manager rather than off-the-shelf equipment (they've since transitioned to the latter approach for purchasing), and after dutifully DBANing the drives clear, I noticed that two of them had superior specs to the two multimedia PCs being used in our household.

As Myth gets more complex and Ubuntu Linux' base requirements creep, we've noticed problems with the platform in a practical environment. Rapid channel-changing of live TV throws errors, DVD playback is flaky, recorded video playback has skips...

Not surprisingly, swapping the HD/tuner card/optical drive out to a faster machine with more modern memory seems to have erased these problems. In all fairness, I've been attempting this platform on some of the most challenging sets of specs (it's the economy, stupid) and when I started this project the Myth wiki was proud of how conservative its requirements were. Unfortunately Myth doesn't control what their platform runs on, and until there's an Arch equivalent of the Mythbuntu distro, they're at the mercy of the Linux ecology's diversity.

To put this in perspective, the first Mythbox I built (before there was a Mythbuntu) was a 450MHz P3/512Mb ECC SDRAM/200Gb Dell Dimension XPS T450 (which previous to acquisition was a Windows Media PC). The current backend/frontend is a P4M266A-8237 homebrew (thanks, lshw), 512Mb PC2700 / 2.8GHz P4 with hyperthreading turned on (which to the 2.6 kernel appears as two CPUs), and a PNY GeForce 2600 with 256Mb of its own memory.

This is the third box this backend has lived on, and the office manager who built it has a knack for gaemen which benefits multimedia platforms. Now, rapid channel changing is smooth, DVD playback is fine, and apparently recorded video playback is smooth too. The bedroom slave backend is a BrkdleG-ICH4, also using PC2700 memory.

It would probably be accurate to say that a good baseline for building a Mythbox is something built within the last twenty-four months or newer, and that perhaps there should be an update window of no more than one or two major Ubuntu releases.

It's a dilemma: there are always sweet, sweet new features in new releases of Myth but their dependencies can take you places your hardware isn't ready for unless it's pimped.

Apple rumors

OK, so the little one is GLASS TRACKPAD and the big one is NON-INTEL CHIPS.

Some on ars technica are speculating that a tiny display would go under the glass trackpad, but I'll be dipped if I can figure out what you'd do with that. And I had a Palm PDA for close to five years.

Non-Intel: Well, typically Apple dumps a chipmaker when they're pissed about something. IBM lost interest in keeping the Power architecture viable for portable computing and essentially told Cupertino to ante up the money if they wanted something comparable to Centrino. As far as anyone knows, the relationship between Apple and Intel was pretty cozy. Personally, I think the MBA is a poor choice as a business computer, but I do respect what Intel managed to do as far as energy consumption and form factor are concerned.

So, the question is: what advantage do you get by leaving Intel? Here are the conspiracy theories, all in a row.

1. Apple wants to kill the Hackintoshes and cloners.
   An interesting theory. Change the architecture enough and move to something less easily emulated on another platform.
   Downsides to this theory: Parallels and BootCamp have sold hundreds of thousands of Macs, and pulling the plug on this bridge to the Windows market isn't insanely great, it's insane. Moreover, Apple was given ample tools from Intel (TPM, EFI) to crack down on clones and hasn't made it a priority.
2. Apple isn't pleased with Montevino not being available for their platform and intends to pull an AMD.
   Now that they own a chipmaker, this is plausible...but unlikely. Intel's fabbing capacity was a linchpin to Apple's ability to churn out Macs to meet worldwide demand.
3. The control freaks of old have resurged at Apple and want to create proprietary boards and chipsets again just like the late 80s/early 90s.
   Possible, given the fact that Apple stubbornly retained their mobo design staff through the Intel transition...except that the relationship with Intel and reuse of the standard northbridge/southbridge architecture has been a profitable one for them.
   
4. Apple isn't ditching Intel CPUs, they just want to design their own mobos and chipsets. This requires the least tinfoil to believe. For one thing, even with the standard PC mobo, the MacBooks have custom keyboard firmware (no internal PS/2 connector), so they've already trod in this ground.
   Downside to this theory: technically Apple's agreement with Intel doesn't allow them to pick and choose what components Intel supplies, with the exception of the big three (audio/video/networking).

Drama is everywhere in the chip industry. AMD is declining even while its ATI is on the rise against Nvidia. Intel has generally gotten good marks for the last five years, and so has Apple.

For once, I can't begin to guess what's going on with this "major transition" mentioned to board members.

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Mobile platform testing

Over the years we discovered that XHTML/CSS as a platform had several advantages: smaller footprint for the website (CSS is cached), ADA compliance... and of course portability for multiple platforms.

Mobile platforms are no exception, because most of their issues are either the same or in parallel with ADA: content needs to be pushed to the top, navigation below, simplified in structure, and a reduced dependence on high-resolution images.

In the beginning, our testing consisted of using Lynx as a way of quickly checking structure and usability. While this is a good hard test, growing levels of usability in mobile platforms are rendering Lynx less and less relevant to what end users can see and do.

Fortunately vendors of these platforms have been good at virtualizing them to testing versions, typically for Windows (and in one case, down to an applet on Opera's website). Whereas desktop renderers have largely shrunk to the big four (MSIE / Gecko / Opera / WebKit), it's important to remember that mobile browsers are not as easily replaceable, and have not yet yielded to the same renderer core shakeout.

This is an informal laundry list of applications and websites I've used to test mobile platforms.

You'll notice (if you browse the Library website) that telephone numbers on this site are in fact working TEL and FAX links whose highlights/underlines are now visible (CSS suppresses the underlines in desktop browsers); clicking the area code dials the full number with "1928" at the beginning, clicking the 7 digit number dials it as a local call.

• Nokia requires you to register in order to get product keys for their mobile emulators (e.g. S60 which scrolls the display over a rendered fullsize page)


• OpenWave


• Opera Mini's website emulator


• DotMobi's website emulator

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Active Directory (dis)integration with Leopard

Daniel Stranahan discovered when he upgraded from Tiger to Leopard that his AD-bound Macs no longer warn him of impending password expiration. Other people have noticed the same thing, and Apple has been remarkably mum on this point. This is exceptionally stupid.

Linux Mint 5.0 beta

Elyssa 5 beta is out, the Mint distro based on Ubuntu 8 Hardy Heron, and I have to say it gets slicker with every release. I still recommend switching the default font from Verdana clone Sans to DejaVu Sans Condensed, but overall it has a very "comfy" feel and so far I'd consider it pretty usable. If you've got friends curious about Linux who don't want to spend the time installing all the nonfree software and codecs, or you just don't want to spend time making Ubuntu not look like rotting vegetation, Mint is worth the try.

Adobe AIR is finally available for Linux as a beta, and it installed in Mint easily. Regrettably websites with AIR apps may tell you that your platform isn't supported, but downloading and double-clicking the AIR file directly will work.

Linux Mint 4.0; first impressions

Installing it as a VM in Parallels, following these instructions as if it were an Ubuntu distro (which it is). I am pleased to say the following about Mint:

• It shaves several steps off my standard Ubuntu post-install procedure because Mint's maintainers think in similar ways
• It comes with a better selection of themes
  
• Single taskbar instead of two
• Genuine attempt to merge Gnome and KDE paradigms
  
• Its simplified "software portal" package finder is actually kind of cool
• No goddamn brown/orange color scheme. There's no polite way to tell Mark Shuttleworth that an OS color scheme can't be based on the color of shit.
  

Never trust a computer that weighs less than a box of Pop Tarts.

The MacBook Air is new and cute, but it's also a different animal than other MacBooks, much less other PCs. If you plan to get one, be aware of the following issues:

• USB hubs are not your friend. The SuperDrive will only work directly plugged into the sole USB port, because its voltage requirements necessitated Apple and Intel overvolting that port. In fact, the SuperDrive will not even work on non-Air MacBooks.
  
• The Ethernet adapter also does not enjoy being run from a hub.
• The out-of-the-box version of Parallels works poorly with flash memory, causing kernel panics whenever Windows does something disk/network intensive. Go to their forums and get build 5592 or later which is optimized for the Air's solid state storage.
• The corollary of the above two is that you'd be better off using Disk Utility to make a disk image of your install media and let Parallels use that instead (it'll be faster, for one thing).

More MacBook Pro notes

• Setting up Active Directory required an AD's username/password, something it doesn't in Windows, but it bound itself nicely to the network and now my network shares do not require individual authentication to work.
• VPN on Request is a load of codswallop. It apparently was designed to respond to a specific set of APIs which are not generally used by cross-platform apps or protocols, SMB among them. This is important because adding network shares to your startup items apparently requires the VPN be on at my employer's, and VPN isn't set to automatically turn itself on from remote locations.
• The solution to this is to keep aliases to the automounted shares in the Documents folder, where they can be manually opened after switching on the VPN.
  
• Thunderbird is dog slow when running POPmail from a network share (please don't ask).

In general, this is beginning to work well.

Further notes on MacBook Pro

• Parallels' version of Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 is non-upgradeable: something about it prevents the usual sudo updatemanager -d method from successfully moving to Hardy Heron, complaining of insufficient disk space (perhaps a side effect of Parallels' compressed filesystems).
• The bug in Adblock Pro which makes blockable applets (Java, Silverlight, Flash) disappear or flicker away on Macs and Macs only (which began with Firefox in OS 9 on PPC Macs) is still present and must be solved by disabling "Show tabs on Flash and Java."
• CTRL-ALT-DEL fails inside of Screen Sharing regardless of the keyboard used (internal, external, Apple or Dell). This is a bug as far as I'm concerned, since Apple's crowing about how it uses the VNC standard. The VNC standard includes a full keyboard, one way or another. I am an idiot. Fn-Ctrl-Command-Del is Ctrl-Alt-Del on a compact keyboard.
  
• I still can't get external blog editing apps to submit blogs as anything other than drafts to Blogger.
• Parallels Transporter sucks. Sucks. Takes an hour to get to 1% and then mysteriously fails, even after optimizing the source computer's hard drive. This is betaware at best unless the folks at Parallels can answer this problem mentioned repeatedly across their forums.
  

MacBook Pro notes

I'm doing this blog entry from Qumana (see link at bottom of post) because I'm not impressed with Blogger's own Web 2.0 platform. Note to Blogger: if you're so freaking fond of AJAX, use it to update the captcha while I'm blogging so I don't get that irritating failed authentication error. Qumana was originally written for Windows, but since it's a Java app it was quickly ported to OS X.

Much of the last few years I've worked pretty closely with Linux. Linux is a damn good way to squeeze performance out of a cheap platform (e.g. used PCs). So, now that I have an irritatingly expensive laptop running OS X, XP SP2, Vista, and Ubuntu, I can test how webpages look in a buttload of browsers simultaneously side by side. The impetus to even learn Linux for me back in 2001 was so I could test our website on Konqueror.

Regrettably X11 is broken in Leopard, which effectively shits all over a number of popular cross-platform open source apps like OpenOffice, Inkscape, GIMP, etc. It's almost as if Apple were not-so-subtly telling developers to port to Aqua. NeoOffice is working like a charm.

The magsafe connector on the Pro is pretty strong. It feels like an electromagnet.

Note to Apple: Your laptops do not have full keyboards. Therefore, they do not have dedicated DEL keys. While Screen Sharing is a pretty application, it appears impossble to send CTRL-ALT-DEL to a host computer from the laptop, because the fn-delete combination is not recognized by the host as DEL or some other reason. We will connect to non-Macs, and we will need special keypresses not available from your keyboard (Linux needs support for SysRq).

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Adobe, kind enough to give you a BitTorrent client

I got my MacBook Pro this afternoon and spent quality time installing CS3 Design on it. I also installed Parallels and discovered that the Ubuntu CD I burned for installs has 52 defects on it, so I opted to download the Parallels-optimized Ubuntu installer.

Most are broken into several downloads, but there's also a torrent. I saved the torrent and just for kicks opened it knowing I hadn't installed any BitTorrent clients.

Opera opened up and obligingly started the torrent. Wait, what? I didn't install Opera. Application folder didn't have Opera in it. Fortunately right-clicking the O icon in the Dock and telling it to show me Opera in the Finder brought up a folder named MacOS with Bridge CS3 as a Unix executable -- and Opera.

Turns out Adobe Bridge has Opera encapsulated inside itself. Slick.

Testing IE8 Beta: Like Ohio, we expected better from you

IE8 Beta went public today, and I'm running it through Meyerweb's CSS2 test suite. Unlike IE7, which had exactly zero CSS properties missing in IE6 (sorry, supporting + and > operators doesn't count), IE8 appears to be the direction IE should have been taking for the last eight years.

Newly supported/fixed:

• Border-spacing
• Pseudoselectors like before: and after:
• Text-align:center no longer incorrectly centers block elements like TABLE but instead cascades down to their first inline element (i.e. cell text). Unbelievable.
• The inherit related problems from IE6/7 seem to have been solved.
• I also note that a rendering bug in IE7 that makes overlapping CSS menus momentarily render with transparent boxes has been fixed.

However, still unsupported in IE while supported elsewhere:

• Quote character declarations
• Counter-reset
• List-style-type and list-style-image
• Font-size-adjust
• Letter-spacing and word-spacing
• Caption-side
• First-line and First-letter
• OBJECT still shits the bed. Get on the stick, dickweeds. OBJECT was supposed to replace IMG two or three NYC skyscrapers ago.
• I haven't tested BUTTON's ability to send the correct properties yet, but I'm not holding my breath.
• XHTML mime-type? Not on XP at any rate: it still attempts to download the file rather than render it.

Sadly, FF and IE still don't support font-stretch or text-shadow.

IE8 has made some progress compared to the pile of fail that was IE7. It still falls damned short of where an XHTML browser ought to be, and the things we told Microsoft to get straight two years ago.

It's disappointing that nothing short of harassment influences the likes of IE's dev staff.

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.