Vista Experiment Dual booting XP, Part 3

So I successfully have a system that dual boots XP SP3 and Ubuntu 8.10. It took a bit of fiddling and research on how to properly configure the GRUB bootloader to recognize where XP's partition was and that it was something bootable.

Like anything Ubuntu related, I found the correct answer through the Ubuntu Forums. It's threads like this one that make Ubuntu Forums such a worthwhile resource. Not only is the user base pro active and helpful, it's large enough that about 95% of any problems you come across running Ubuntu have already been posted and solved. Even when I transitioned to 8.10 a few weeks early I found that there was already a great deal of posting about how to get just about everything working even with beta software.

At the end of the day computers are far too useful to be held down by only one OS. There are things that are easily done in linux that just don't work as well in Windows. On the other hand, Linux, no matter what the distribution, can produce real headaches and lots of time configuring and rebooting to diagnose a problem--and most of the time its something like a proprietary video driver that you wouldn't have to spend but a few seconds on in Windows to get it functioning.

I've been part of the linux community since about 1999 and have participated in varying degrees. Just recently I've become involved in posting on the forums when I can help diagnose a problem, but most of my experience is that of the end-user. I can't stress enough how happy I am with how the linux community has developed and I feel like the OS is finally getting to a point of maturity that would allow it to be used by just about any average user. It's still going to remain the choice of true enthusiasts though, because its free and legal and ultimately incredibly scalable.

The relative ease of installing and dual booting XP was a pleasant surprise, and I'm actually impressed at the boot time of the tidied up repack of SP3 that I ended up loading. I'm looking forward to getting Photoshop up and running and finally getting to stretch the legs of the graphics card I bought a few months ago. I don't think I'll be able to run super-current games, but I look forward to installing some classics that I used to play (Black & White, anyone?) and see what I can throw at it before it breaks.

Also, this really wouldn't have happened if not for this article over at APCmag, which gave me the courage to go ahead and take the plunge and commit to the install. They're actually got a whole series of articles about dual booting. If you're a Windows user that wants to see what this whole linux thing is, or a linux user that's a little unsure when it comes to partition tables, it's really never been a more straight-forward process to dual boot your PC.

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Vista Experiment, Part 2: Epic Fail

So none of the Vista disks I have want to load on my system. At all. Therefore, I switched to XP Professional SP3, which is installing now.

The only thing thats kind of a drag about the install is that I had to disconnect my IDE hard drive because Windows doesn't take kindly to being installed on a second disk unless it gets to write on the Master Boot Record of the main drive. Needless to say, it will be a bit easier to make changes to Grub once I install, without having to use a live cd to get let back into your OS.

Currently formating the 50gb I left free on my new SATA drive to, wretch, NTFS via the XP good ole' text based installer. XP is what I have to use at work, and I'm really only installing it because I have the extra space now. Worst case scenario is that I lose the 50 or so gb that I'v written on the first partition of the new disk, but I find that to be not very likely.

Just a couple of notes on the install so far:

I'd almost forgotten how far Linux distros have come in the last few years in terms of ease of use. Windows seems incredibly painful just even getting it off its feet, and this is software that you have to pay for.

The fact that Vista just said "No," to my hardware doesn't do much to reaffirm my faith in Microsoft. I'm hopeful that Windows 7 will buck the trend started by Vista. I thought MS was all about hardware compatibility anyway. Or at least that's the impression I get from the fanboys, however few of them are left.

It's funny too that my failed Vista install happened today, hot on the heels of this article at PCWorld, about how XP is refusing to fall by wayside behind Vista.

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Analog Apartment = New Favorite Blog

Analog Apartment is a new blog that I found out about via twitter. I think they saw my tweet the other day about listening to Magnolia Electric Co on vinyl and started to follow me.

They blog about storage solutions and cool vinyl nerd stuff in general, so they're pretty much right up my alley. It's cool to find blogs that are fairly new--its exciting to see a little community grow up out of just a handful of posts.

The other cool part of Analog Apartment is that the site is a launching pad for a developing web app that would act as a cataloging service for vinyl collectors. I had an idea similar to this a few years ago, but I think it was more along the lines of a social network than a web app. Pretty neat stuff tho, so I gave them my email so I'll get updates on their progress. Good luck!

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Vista Experiment, Part 1

Well to start off, the name of the this post is a bit of a misnomer since I haven't been able to successfully get it up and running on my computer yet. I'm trying one more disk before I go tried and true with XP. So far, three different versions of Vista have failed to even boot for me, BSOD'ing after the initial load from the disk.

Granted, if this had happend with a linux distro, I'd probably been able to scour forums and find at least something relevant to whatever issue was causing the system to lock up before it even got interesting. So I'm just waiting on the next discs to arrive, and I'm thinking I might just go the complete opposite direction and load another linux distribution onto the extra partition I've left on my new 500gb SATA drive. I'd forgotten that non-ancient harddrives run whisper quiet compared to the grinding cacophony that comes out of my older hardware.

So Vista, you're losing the challenge of making me ignore all the bad hype. The only reason I have to run Windows anyway is that I want to have issue-free installs of the newest Adobe Products on my desktop, because doing graphics-anything on my laptop really sucks.

Also, after spending a few days getting acquainted with our editing comp at the office, I desperately want to bring some sanity to its heavily disorganized workflow. Multiple User Accounts on one machine running OS X = bad.

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We Like the Cars, the Cars That Go BOOM!

From Lying In the Gutter, Looking At the Stars:



This is an excellent little tumblog I found recently, so check it out!

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This is why I'm a bad blogger.

Lack of capitalization in headlined, maybe? Probably not. I've not been able to keep up with me 1-2 day posting schedule at all this month--its been really quite dismal actually. But here's the scoop, and you'll know most of this if you communicate with me regularly or follow my facebook or twitter.

I went to San Francisco last week, for the first time, to do some filming for my most current project. Although I can't go into details about the project, its associate with the most recent web development that I've done, and involves historic formula one cars. Lots of historic formula one cars.

We got a lot of good footage, mostly interviews, and we're really excited to start editing it into what we already have. I wish I could do a little better in terms of details about this, because its all really exciting, but being intellectual property that's not my own I'm unable to go any further.

That's not to say that this is the last post about this by any means though.

I'm going to be super lazy and only post two of the pictures here from over the weekend, but take a look at them on my flickr.

I love those abstracted rack focuses. Favorite photo of the weekend.

Obviously, the other picture has yours truly in it. The other gentleman pictured is "Dangerous" Brian, a fine mechanic and the most excellent of hosts. Brian made me stop taking pictures and get in the car to see if the steering wheel was still too close to the driver's knees, making it so you ended up pressing against it to depress the very stiff clutch. Brian would have done it himself if he wasn't entirely too large a person to fit the cramped cockpit of this 50s era F1. Get back to me for the year and model, there were far too many to remember.

The other photos are here. There are about 20 others up as of this writing with more on the way. Maybe some stills from the weekend too, we were shooting in 1080 the whole time--and we got some truly gorgeous stuff!

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Flock Makes Me Feel like I'm Cheating On FireFox

Flock is a newish browser based on Firefox 3 that has a plethora of social networking and web 2.0 tools integrated right into the browser. With feature rich extensions for sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Flickr, Flock attempts to reshape the web browsing experience with new layers of functionality. By taking advatage of the various APIs, Flock delivers social networking like status updates and photo uploading without having to browse directly to the site. Using the good ole sidebar and a spiffy media stream pane that appears above your tabs, I've got to give it to Flock for taking a new approach for using the internet.

There are a couple of things that bother me though. First, I've gotten so used to the minimalist Firefox theme in OS X that the bright colored buttons and generally shinyness are a bit distracting. Second, I couldnt get the Digg functionality to work, but admittedly I gave up when it didn't work automatically like everything else did. Other than that, Flock seems very well packaged, and could definitely displace Firefox for a good deal of my daily browsing.

Also, Flock includes a great RSS aggregator and a pretty decent blog editor (which I happen to be using), which are both something that you can incorporate into Firefox with a good deal more custimaztion.

Overall, this is a browser that has a lot of potential and can hopefully inform some future upstream development in Firefox. I'm definitely sticking with Firefox as my go-to browser because Flock seems a bit distracted by all of its features at times. It's great for anyone that relies on a social networking addiction to get through their work week.

Oh and the branding on their website is lame :P

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