Teknovis

As I previous wrote, I am using Windows 7 as my main Windows operating system on my laptop.

To date, I dislike it intensely! I have not found a single useful feature that would really cause me to upgrade a Windows XP computer.

So today I am going to compain about the Windows Explorer! The following issues really annoy me, and I have been unable to find any solutions or workarounds online:

• The Windows Ribbon drives me nuts! It occupies a lot of area, and it does not give me any useful options that are not already available in the toolbar! I want it to vanish!
• Unfortunately, the entire toolbar area at the top of each window has grown very big :( I loved the way that I used to be able to put the address bar on the toolbar.
• I find the favourites that insist on appearing at the top of the panel on the left hand side to be useless to me.
• Why is there no button to allow me to “Go up one level” in the directory hierarchy?
• The status bar no longer contains useful information, such as the total file size when more than one file is selected!

Great, now I feel better :)

Tags: Windows 7, Windows XP

I have been happily using Windows 2000 in my home network for many years. My setup was fairly simple – I had a Windows 2000 Server that acted as a domain controller with roaming profiles enabled, and as a file and printer server for approximately six computers and six mobile devices. It also doubled up as a workstation.

All of this worked very well in my home network, although it was starting to show its age and limitations. However, about two weeks ago the server refused to boot properly after it crashed :( Instead of getting the normal login screen, I got the following error message:

Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the following error: Directory Service cannot start. Error Status: 0xc00002e1. Please click OK to shutdown this system and reboot into Directory Services Restore Mode, check the event log for more detailed information.

It appears that the reason for this is that my Active Directory became corrupted due to the crash (see Directory Services cannot start” error message when you start your Windows-based or SBS-based domain controller and Err Msg: Security Accounts Manager Initialization Failed Because of the Following Error: Directory Service Cannot Start).

Unfortunately, I do not have a backup of my Active Directory. More importantly, I do have a complete backup of all my data :)

Rather than rebuilding everything in the same way I have decided to use the opportunity to do some upgrading :)

So now I am going to install Ubuntu Desktop on my server. I am then going to install VirtualBox. This will be my host server.

Next I will create two virtual machines to run on my host server:

• The first virtual machine will be Ubuntu Server, and it will act as my domain controller (using Samba).
• The second virtual machine will also be Ubuntu Server, and it will act as my file server (again using Samba).

My main motivation in doing this is that it will make backup trivial (just copy the entire virtual machine), and it removes my dependence on hardware!

Now all I need to do is start implementing this great plan :)

Tags: Samba, Ubuntu, VirtualBox, Windows 2000

I have a friend who is a huge fan of all things coming from the template of Ikea :) (I am slowly trying to get her to become an Ubuntu fan also :) )

Anyway, she knows of my interest in all things computer related, so she sent me a link to an article describing how to convert a piece of Ikea furniture into a Linux cluster: What’s with Helmer, the 24 core Linux cluster?.

Actually, the Ikea Hacker blog is pretty interesting :o

Tags: Ubuntu

I needed to edit a photo on somebody’s computer today. I needed to crop the photo, and then sharpen it. Unfortunately, there was no software installed on the computer that would do it :(

I previously wrote about an online photo editor called Pixenate in Online Photo Editor. Unfortunatly, it is not able to sharpen photos :(

So I did a search, and I found Pixlr. It is really slick, and it appears to be very functional!

Tags: Pixenate, Pixlr

I was going mad today trying to select a non-contiguous range in Microsoft Excel until I came across this tip:

Any range can be non-contiguous. All you do is, as you are selecting cells with the mouse, hold the Control key down. You will be able to select as many disjoint blocks of cells on one sheet as you like. All Excel ranges can only be on one sheet, so your non-contiguous blocks cannot be on separate sheets, and cannot span sheets.

It is taken from Excel’s Non-Contiguous Ranges.

Tags: Microsoft

I came across three interesting settings for my tabs in Firefox today:

• In previous versions new tabs were always added to the right hand side of the tab bar. I found this very useful, because if I read my tabs from left to right it was a sort of First-In, First-Out queue. However, I could not understand why the new tab location seemed to be a bit random in the latest version :| After some searching I found Why to embrace Firefox 3.6′s new-tab ethos, which explains the logic bethind the new tab location :o After reading this I decided to try it for a while longer, and at least I now know how to change this behaviour if I change my mind!
• You can enable a very nice graphical tab switcher as described in Enable Visual Tab Switcher in Firefox 3.6.
• You can enable thumbnail previews of tabs in Windows 7 as described in Unlock thumbnail previews for Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7.

Enjoy!

Tags: Firefox, Windows 7

I updated my installation of VirtualBox to version 3.2.6 today. It was very straight-forward, and I have not noticed any differences yet.

I was also prompted to update my Guest Additions.

Tags: VirtualBox

I have been installing and configuring Firefox a lot of times this week! It is becoming a bit repetitive!

I think that nearly all of the default settings are perfect, and I just change a few of them. Probably the most important of these is that I add more accept languages.

I then install the following add-ons and plugins:

• A nice theme (and I modify the toolbars)
• Additional dictionaries
• Adobe Flash Player

Lastly, I make the following changes to the configuration file (See About:config for instructions on doing this):

• Remove the close button from the tab (see tip 7 in 28 Coolest Firefox About:Config Tricks)
• Change the URL text so that it becomes clickable on all operating systems (see tip 15 in 28 Coolest Firefox About:Config Tricks)
• Change URL search behaviour so that it returns the normal Google results (see Change Address Bar Search Behavior In Firefox)
• Disable large image resizing (see Stop Automatic Image Resizing)
• Enable spell-checking on all text boxes (see tip 10 in 28 Coolest Firefox About:Config Tricks)

I can now reference this online myself :)

Tags: Adobe, Firefox, Google

Last week I finally got my new laptop! I did get a Dell, but I did not get the Studio that I was considering in Virtualising my Laptop. The laptop came with Windows 7, and for the moment I have decided to leave that as my host operating system. However, I am already hating it, but I will leave that for another blog post…

After reading the articles described in VMware Workstation Versus VirtualBox I decided to try using VirtualBox, and I installed version 3.2.4. It installed perfectly.

I then tried to create my first virtual machine. This is where I had a few problems, that I will describe here:

• I was unable to assign more than 1500MB of Memory to my virtual machine :( After some research online I discovered this is a limitation of using a 32bit host operating system :o
• I assigned my virtual machine 2 processors since my laptop is dual core. However, when I tried to start the virtual machine I got an error code (VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED). It turns out that this means that the required hardware support for virtualisation is disabled in the BIOS. It was a bit tricky, because after changing this BIOS setting a hard reboot is required for it to become active – the normal soft reboot is not sufficient.
• I needed to install the Guest Additions in order to get the guest operating system to correctly identify and use my monitor resolution.

Since then everything has been working perfectly, and so far I have been very impressed!

Tags: Dell, Microsoft, VirtualBox, Windows 7

I previously described how I wanted to virtualise my laptop in Virtualising my Laptop. I have made some progress with this, but not as much as I would have liked :(

I heard some great recommendations for VirtualBox recently, so I decided to investigate it a bit further. I found the following articles the most useful:

• VMware vs. VirtualBox Part 2 is very recent, and it provides a very good performance comparison. (The original, but now out-dated article is VMware vs. VirtualBox.)
• Is it a Real Box or is it VirtualBox? provides a performance overview of the latest version of VirtualBox.
• Both VirtualBox 3.0.4 vs. VMware Workstation 6.5.3 and VirtualBox 3.1.2 vs VMware Player 3.0 (First Class Flyer) provide objective and subjective comparisons.

I think that all of this is enough to convince me that VirtualBox is a real contender! The next step is to download it and try it myself :)

I also did some reading about how the virtual machine software handles multiple cores and Hyper-threading. It appears that it is able to distinguish between them, and it will always allocate cores before a Hyper-threaded unit. I understand this from reading the following two documents:

• Performance Tuning and Benchmarking Guidelines for VMware Workstation 6
• HyperThreading Support in VMware ESX Server 2

This weekend I also downloaded Ubuntu 10.04, although I have not had time to try it yet.

Tags: Ubuntu, VirtualBox, VMware