Liam on Linux

Once you've installed a new kernel - they come periodically as part of your system updates - and you have rebooted into it and know it works fine, you can, if you wish, remove the old one to keep your GRUB boot
menu nice and tidy.

The way I do it is this:

- run Synaptic

- in the Quick Search box, enter the kernel main revision: for
instance, at the moment, for 10.04, that is 2.6.32 - do *NOT* include
the build number, the one on the end after a hyphen.

- now click the 1st column header, where it says "S". This sorts the
list by installation status. You want the entries with green squares
coming first - in other words, it's listing the installed packages
first, followed by ones that are not installed.

- go to the top of the list, if necessary, with the scrollbar. You
should now see 3 entries for each installed kernel version.

E.g. I have:

linux-headers-2.6.32-21
linux-headers-2.6.32-21-generic
linux-headers-2.6.32-22
linux-headers-2.6.32-22-generic
linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic
linux-image-2.6.32-22-generic

Note that there are 3 entries for Linux 2.6.32-21 and 3 for Linux 2.6.32-22.

What you do next is to select the 3 entries for the older version - that is:
linux-headers-2.6.32-21
linux-headers-2.6.32-21-generic
linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic

It's VERY IMPORTANT that you leave the entries for the current kernel - 2.6.32-22 in this case - UNselected.

Once you have selected the 3 parts of the older kernel version - hold down the Control key and click them to group-select - next, right-click them and pick "Mark for Complete Removal".

Then click Apply. Wait for Synaptic to remove the old kernel.

Reboot and you'll see only your latest kernel in the list.

Do this very carefully. Remove the wrong bits and you will leave your system unable to boot!

If you're not confident about doing this kind of thing, don't. Just ignore the older entries in GRUB.

So you were one of the pioneers, were you?

Hardly. The first Flash-building tools were aimed at graphic designers, and were all about simple animations - no thought of Rich Internet Applications then. It had a really terrible scripting language containing the comparative operators lt and le for < and <=, presumably reflecting the popularity of Perl and FORTRAN among the Photoshopping community.

Is it ta-ta for Flash?

Interview with a Flash Harriet

By Verity Stob

One commenter to my big post about VirtualBox the other day - an old mate from CIX, syllopsium - said that he found VBox's support for OSs other than Windows or Linux to be pretty poor.

So, I thought I'd try the only couple of ISOs I have of OSs that don't belong to either of those families: OpenSolaris (0609 build) and PC-BSD 7.1 (a distro of FreeBSD 7). Interesting both BSD & Solaris are on VBox's list of supported VM types, so I guess they ought to work. Certainly both booted happily from their ISO files, straight into functioning GUIs. OpenSolaris is a live desktop, so I was even able to get Web access from it.

I'm particularly amused by OpenSolaris. It took 2min to boot. On my old PC - an AthlonXP 2800+ with 2G of RAM, so old but not an antique - the same copy of OpenSolaris, burned to a CD, took about 20-25min to boot, and when it did, I had no working Ethernet ports so no working Internet access either. It's a great deal faster in a VM on this machine than on bare metal on the old ones. OK, so, access to a cached ISO file is quicker than a physical optical disk, but not that much faster on the other OSs I have tried. Linux Mint didn't install hugely quicker than on a physical machine - I doubt it was as little as half the time, more like ²/₃ of the time.

I must try both of these on the native hardware soon.

I'm discovering some limitations to the XP support, though. It is as one person in CIX:linux (slightly scornfully) described it: "a transparent-desktop job". XP windows do not intermingle with Linux windows; all XP windows form a single layer on the Linux desktop. Either they're all on top or none of them are. Also, in seamless mode, I can't move XP windows off the primary monitor onto my secondary screen - the seamless window is auto-sized to my primary monitor and that's all you get.

Neither of these is killer problems. One that is more awkward is that because GNOME sees the XP VM as a single task, although I have a Spotify window on my Linux desktop, I can't alt-tab to it or select it from the GNOME window selector (when that is actually working, which on a vertical panel is fairly seldom). I think that both VMware Fusion and Parallels on the Mac have solved this.

I still think it's pretty damn fantastic, all the same, mind...

I've not had a PC quick enough to really use PC-on-PC virtualisation in anger before, until ednun gave me the carcase of his old one. AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+, 2G RAM, no drives or graphics.

I've upped it to 4G, a couple of old 120GB EIDE hard disks, a DVD burner, a replacement graphics card (freebie from a friend) & a new Arctic Cooling Freezer7 Pro heatsink/fan from eBay to replace the old, clogged-up AMD OEM one. Total budget, just under £20; result, quick dual-core 64-bit machine with 64-bit Linux running very nicely.

For some work stuff. I've been using Linux-under-Linux in VirtualBox, which works rather well - but it's a kinda specialised need. There are still a few things that either don't work all that well in Linux or which I can't readily do, though. Spotify runs under WINE but crackles & pops then stops playing after 2-3 minutes & never emits another cheep. My CIX reader, Ameol, also runs OK under WINE, but windows don't scroll correctly. I don't think there's any Linux software to sync my mobile phone or update its firmware, although I'm not sure I'd want to try the latter from within a VM anyway, just in case...

So I decided to try running Windows in a VM under Linux just for occasional access to a handful of Windows apps, without rebooting into my Windows 2000 & Windows 7RC partitions. (Makes mental note: better replace that Win7 one before the RC expires.)

I've always had reservations about running a "full-sized" copy of Windows this way. It seems very wasteful of resources to me. That is, running one full-fat full-function OS under another full-fat OS, just for access to a couple of apps. (Also, you need a licence, if the guest is a modern, commercial product, not some ancient piece of abandonware.)

So I thought I'd try some "legacy" versions of Windows to see how well they worked. I have a fairly good archive here, from Windows 3.1 up to Win7.
( Read more... )

Public service announcement here, following an epic battle this evening.

Ubuntu, and thus Mint, print via CUPS, and include HP's modifications to this to support HP's printers - a subsystem called HPLIP. The snag is, the version they include in Mint 7 (based on Ubuntu 9.04) is 3.9.2 - and if you want to connect a current-model HP printer such as a Deskjet D2660 (one of the last pure-printer-only inkjets on the market, AFAICS) or a F2480 (a decent, inexpensive little all-in-one multifunction type device), these need a newer version of HPLIP.

HP provide a downloadable installer for v3.9.10 of this here:
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/install/install/index.html

The snag is, it doesn't work on Mint 7. It has a whole pile of dependencies and it can't resolve them on its own. (Maybe because Mint 7 isn't a supported distro - I don't know.) I've not yet tried Mint 8 (which only came out today) or Ubuntu, but I suspect there will be similar problems on Ubuntu 9.04 at least.

But I've found a way to do it.

Pre-installing this little lot of packages allows the installer to at least run through to completion:

ubuntu-dev-tools
python-all-dev
libcups2-dev
libusb-1.0-0
libusbdev
libtool
libcupsimage2-dev

However, the HP installer still complains that a load of optional pieces are missing, so you get no printer GUI, no scanning and so on.

This additional pile fixes that:

python-qt4-common
python-qt4-dbus
python-reportlab
xsane
libsane-dev

Install all of them - you could just "apt-get install" the whole list, separated by spaces, that should do it - and HPLIP 3.8.10 installs fine.

It still doesn't print, though. To get that working, one last step is needed. As root or using "sudo", you need to go to the directory

/usr/lib/cups/filter

and make a symlink to create a standin for a missing file:
ln -s foomatic-rip foomatic-rip-hplip

Do this, reboot, plug in your new HP, and it should Just Work™.

Hope that Google finds this and it helps someone... :¬)

lostcarpark told me a while ago that he'd found a Linux distro that he was happy with on his netbook. It was Crunchbang or #! to its friends.

So I've taken the plunge and nuked Ubuntu clean off my laptop - which is a few years old, even though I only bought it a year ago, and thus is no powerhouse - and bunged #! on instead.

It's a slightly intimating new world that feels rather like an old one from a decade and a half ago. Gone are the pleasures of Gnome and right-clicking on stuff to modify its settings. Whereas some familiar tools are still there, like Firefox and whatnot, OpenOffice has gone, and it's taken hours of fiddling to find a panel that I can live with. The default tint2 is a bit too minimal for me and when I tried to put it up the right-hand edge of my screen - a old-fashioned matter of editing the config file and restarting it - it actually displayed on the left, while shunting apps over to leave a gap at the right. Hmmm.

Next I tried lxpanel then bmpanel and finally I've settled on fbpanel which has the all-important-to-me autohide functionality. On my Thinkpad's 1024x768 screen, I don't want to waste space on a permanent panel. I never knew there were so many to choose from!

Then it was a bit of hacking at its config file to banish the menu and quicklaunch icons - as #! has its own methods for this, and I don't want to bother duplicating stuff - and then editing Openbox's menus to replace references to tint2 with fbpanel. This is after I'd tweaked Openbox's autorun script to launch fbpanel instead of tint2 instead of lxpanel instead of tint2.

Then install Firefox 3.5 and Chromium and edit the menus to distinguish between those.

Now, since my trusty IBM has no Windows key, I have to remap something else in its place for all #!'s keyboard shortcuts to work.

After disabling DRI in X.org, it's fairly quick, I'll give it that.

I'll give it a few weeks and see how I get on. If it bogs down, I might decamp to actual Debian.

But somehow it all seems terribly 1996...

[I did actually get an offer to buy this piece, which is a few months old now, but I was just changing publishers and decided it would be impolitic. So, have a freebie. :¬) ]

After the on-again off-again IBM deal, Sun Microsystems has agreed to sell itself to Oracle for £5 billion – a deal which both companies had managed to keep very quiet.

Unarguably, there is vastly less overlap between Sun and Oracle than with IBM. If the earlier deal had gone ahead, there would have been rivalry between SPARC and POWER, between Solaris and AIX, between two server ranges, two storage ranges and much else besides. But there will still be blood on the floor in the Oracle merger. Oracle has its own enterprise operating system, Oracle Unbreakable Linux – essentially a rebadged version of CentOS, which is itself Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the names and serial numbers filed off. OUL has not been a huge success – not that OpenSolaris has, either – but Solaris still has considerable traction and goodwill attached to it among the sort of high-end enterprise Unix people that still don't entirely trust Linux. Sun's flirtations with Linux have long seemed a little uneasy, and the Oracle deal will probably end them.

Otherwise, though, it's a good fit. Both companies are big-iron sort of vendors, selling mainly to large enterprises. Both favour Java. Many Oracle installations run on Sun kit – although the deal will certainly make life interesting for salespeople trying to push Oracle systems on other vendors' hardware. Still, an all-in-one hardware-to-software-to-integration-consultancy sell may prove distinctly advantageous up against major rivals HP and IBM.

A significant issue could be over the two's open-source database programs. Sun owns MySQL, the leading FOSS database which powers a million small websites and blogs, as well as a few big ones. Oracle owns Innobase, one of the leading storage engines for MySQL. The whole ensemble being under one of the biggest of big corporate roofs will not reassure FOSS enthusiasts. A careful VMware-style spin-out here might appease the ravening GNU hordes (or should that be herds?)

Sun's SPARC server line may also be a difficult sell in an increasingly x86-dominated world. Fujitsu are a major partner here and a sell-off might tempt the newly-merged company, but it's far from certain Fujitsu would be big enough to go it alone with SPARC – if it were interested at all.

A lot of people in the IT industry won't be interested at all. Today, an entire generation of IT staffers, from helpdesk minions to IT directors, know nothing but PCs and Microsoft. For them, the answer is Microsoft, now what's the question; the only one they ask is if anyone is cheaper than Dell for the commodity boxes to run it on. It's an increasingly hard sell to persuade such types that for big systems, non-Windows systems can offer much better scalability, continuity, performance and uptime. When you're used to rolling out hundreds of little Exchange boxes, each supporting hundreds of people, the notion that one big – and expensive – box could support all of those tens of thousands is scary and alien. It's getting even harder now that virtualisation is legitimising the argument for ever-bigger piles of commodity, “industry-standard” kit. The result is lots of little virtual Windows servers running on a few honking great Windows servers, and a veritable nightmare of patching, updates and zero-day exploits rampaging across an IT monoculture built around tools originally designed for desktop PCs, with security, scalability and manageability bolted on later.

But that is the pitch that Sun/Oracle's sales lizards will have to make. Small companies grow from little ones, and little ones start off using tools well-suited to little, cash-poor businesses: cheap generic PCs, cheap generic software and cheap generic IT staff. Sun/Oracle's big systems are arguably a much better fit for big corporations, but getting to there from here is a scary and expensive journey. The world depression will thin out a lot of the big old dead wood from the corporate forest, though, and the fast-growing saplings rising to replace them could be a lucrative market.

The new company will be a giant to rival HP and IBM, but much less inclined to hedge its bets than these two. IBM is dissociating itself from the commodity PC market, focussing on consultancy and its own proprietary large server systems and software, bridged to the wider world via an open-armed but vendor-agnostic approach to open source and Linux. HP is doing quite well being the big daddy of serious corporate PC kit, from pocket devices via high-volume workstations to big servers, while de-emphasising its own legacy proprietary boxes running Itanium, HP-UX and OpenVMS. It increasingly just leaves the software side up to Microsoft.

Sun/Oracle has a bolder, more difficult road to tread: its own servers and storage and its own bottom-to-top proprietary software stack – albeit judiciously open-sourced or based on industry standards in places. It's a good stack, but the new company will boldly stand alone. Let's hope it doesn't end up getting hobbled, to fall and have its congress of clever technology dismembered by the less-proud pragmatic we'll-get-on-with-our-enemies approaches of HP or IBM.

Despite a noble history of powerful workstations and some industry-leading design and build quality, Sun/Oracle barely has a presence in the desktop market any more outside of SunRay thin clients, and its desktop software has not exactly received an orgasmic welcome. There is another acquisition candidate here, who lead the world in immaculately-designed hardware and proprietary software, but whose entry-level servers are languishing. Currently, it's doing just fine, but if its charismatic but ailing founder and CEO "does a McNeally" and hands over the reins, Apple would fit into the new Sun/Oracle empire quite nicely.

I've been putting Ubuntu on a few PCs for people recently. Even with the rise of things like Mint, Ubuntu is ever-increasingly my default Linux. It Just Works™ to a degree that is almost Mac-like, and 9.04 adds much faster bootup and shutdown and snazzy on-screen notifications. (Actually, they're reminiscent of Growl on Mac OS X, another resemblance, but that's incidental.)

I took a client's last old Athlon box, from 1999, cleaned it up, stuck the Jaunty Jackalope CD in, and rebooted. Nuked everything, did a default install, and the machine goes like stink now. Everything worked out of the box, it boots in well under 30sec, and Firefox and OpenOffice are responsive and entirely usable - on an Athlon XP 750MHz with 384MB of RAM and a 10GB hard disk. Quite impressive.

I've also talked to a PC builder -- friend of a friend -- who'd never tried Linux before. He was dazzled at how quick and easy Ubuntu was to get working. No drivers to download and install, no applications, and it went like stink on a really low-end PC - an AMD Sempron 1250 with 512MB of RAM, about the cheapest, lowest-end desktop box he could build. He's a convert.

The only thing that's not worked for me is the RAID controller in my new server - a Dell PowerEdge 600SC with a Dell-badged LSI MegaRAID i4 card controlling half a dozen 80GB EIDE drives. I'm going to try a 3Ware card and see if that's any better.

But so easy is it that I thought I'd have a look at some other OSs on my main PC. I binned my two spare Linux installs (OpenSUSE and Mint) and reshuffled the partitions to make space for a couple of 16GB primaries.

First candidate: OpenSolaris, the brand-new 2009/06 edition that came out last week. The LiveCD booted, no problem - just v e r y s l o w l y. After 10min of searching, it found my hard disks; I picked a partition and told it to go. It took about 45min to install, and "rebooted" by reloading the OS from the new partition - so I couldn't log in, as my new user's credentials had not been picked up. And the login screen has no shutdown/reboot option.

I hit the power switch. It shut down cleanly -- took a couple of minutes -- and rebooted. It's configured GRUB for itself, but blithely ignored the existing Windows 2000, Windows 7 and Ubuntu systems - no trace of them left. Solaris booted quite happily, if a bit slowly, and let me log in as myself -- but it refused to let me use the root account, for no stated reason. Graphics worked, albeit only single-head, and so did sound, though at the same time as audio alerts, it beeps the system speaker, which on this machine drowned out the digital audio.

But neither network port works. Both need proprietary drivers, apparently, either for my nForce integrated or 3Com onboard Gigabit ports. And with no connectivity, I can't download 'em. Nor can I fetch a graphics driver.

OK, so, scratch Solaris for now. Next candidate: PC-BSD. Version 1 of this worked a treat on my old Thinkpad a couple of years back, so I thought it would be a breeze.

Nope. Boot process freezes after detecting the EIDE drives.

Finally, for a laugh, I thought I'd try a hacked copy of Mac OS X - OSX86, as it's sometimes called. I used a hacked DVD called Kalyway, widely available via Bittorrent. Nope - the Darwin bootloader says "this system is not supported." Alllll-righty then.

So I used an Ubuntu LiveCD to reinstate my GRUB bootloader and here I am back in trusty old Ubuntu. Where, to my delight, just yesterday, the alpha-test version of Google's Chromium browser suddenly started working - for the last month or two, it's refused to load up on my machine. So now, I have a lightning-fast browser to leave Gmail open in alongside Firefox for more mundane stuff.

It's interesting. Five years of Ubuntu, and still, the gap between it -- representing about as good as desktop Linux gets -- and the rivals isn't narrowing much...

If folks have not seen it, that strange boy reddragdiva is starting a campaign on Facebook to SAVE VISTA.

I just though I'd share some of the plaudits that have allegedly been rolling in:

"I fully support this initiative. My computer business employs 200
people; the best possible thing for it is to make sure Vista continues
and goes forward." - M. Shuttleworth, London

"I can't tell you how much Vista has done for my business. So many
people depend on it." - S. Jobs, Cupertino

"Vista is the one thing that will keep people seeking out and using
systems that are at the forefront of technology. It's been the best
thing for all of us." - L. Torvalds, Portland.

"I'm ... I'm touched. *sob* I didn't think anyone cared. You guys.
Developers! *sob*" - S. Ballmer, Seattle.

Normally my desktop PC runs Ubuntu, and by and large, I'm happy with it. It's stable, reliable & highly customisable, and it does everything I need. I have WINE set up with Internet Explorer 6 in case of any balky websites but I can't remember the last time I needed it. Certainly not for 2 or 3 years.

But I need to "keep my hand in" with Windows. My laptop mainly runs a vanilla Windows XP preload, as Linux' power management isn't quite there yet - & it's also the machine I use for updating my smartphone's firmware & suchlike, the odd task thar mandates Windows.

I did try Vista out in the form of TinyVista, a drastically cut-down version to be found on various Bittorrent sites. It ran happily on my 1GB Athlon XP 2800+ for a couple of months, then fell foul of the dreaded WGA. (Which is fair enough, really, as it wasn't genuine.) So did the copy of TinyXP that lived alongside it.

So last weekend I decided to nuke both & try the release candidate of Windows 7 out. It's not officially available 'til May 5th but it too is all over the torrent indices - look for Build 7100. You'll need a beta licence key, but MS are still issuing those to anyone with a Technet sigh-on. (I believe that any MS Passport ID will do, so dig out your old Hotmail address or MSN sign-on.)

Especially compared to Vista, W7 is quite sleek & pretty. Rather than Vista's forbidding blank black boot screen with just a copyright notice & an activity indicator, W7 has a nifty little animation: 4 dots in red, green yellow & blue swirl out of the black, coalesce in a flare of rendered light, which fades slightly to reveal a pulsing, glowing Windows flag.

The setup program is very minimal: it asks for language, which disk partition to use & then swings into action with a warning that several automatic reboots are to come. it's not kidding: I wasn't paying close attention & the 1st, at 71%, took me by surprise & made me think I had a hardware problem. When W7 booted, it tried to start the setup program afresh. I swore at it, rebooted and bunged an elderly copy of Windows 2000 Pro on instead, in a different partition.

Even an elderly Athlon is quite quick for Win2K & in about 20min I was in action - ready for hours of installing drivers, services packs & other essentials for a usable PC. I started but after a couple of reboots, I decided out of boredom to see what it was that Windows was calling the "unknown operating system on C:" - which actually used to be a copy of MS-DOS extracted from a Win98SE boot floppy. (It's just the thing for reflashing BIOSes & so forth, & having a tiny unused FAT16 boot drive is handy for catching out badly-written crapware that writes to C:\ even when Windows is installed elsewhere.)

And lo! The "unknown OS" was in fact the intact Win7 bootloader, with additional entries for the defunct & overwritten TinyXP & TinyVista. I chose W7 just to see what happened. This time, there was a very different boot sequence. Apparently some 26,577 or so files needed to be updated - I know not why. Then it updated its registry and did some initialisation. After this, I was prompted for a username and password - still, to my surprise, no licence key - and I was into the desktop.

Apart from the strange iconic taskbar, it's very Vista-like. Happily my chipset-integrated Ethernet port was working, meaning a live Internet connection, & W7 asked if it could go online & fetch some updates. It proceeded to download & install various drivers - sound, graphics card etc. - until almost everything was working. Oddly, the PC's 2nd LAN port, an onboard 3Com Ethernet chip, was skipped, and I had to install my pre-downloaded driver for that. My favourite Vista feature - yes, there are some! - survives here: I could just point W7 at the root of my directory tree full of drivers & it happily recursively searches for those it needs. XP & all its ancestors, by contrast, needs to be manually pointed at each individual folder, a tiresome hassle I've performed more hundreds of times than I care to recall.

There's no sidebar any more, and "screen resolution" has been promoted to the top level of the desktop context menu, which should be a crowd-pleaser. I was easily able to set up my dual monitors and move the taskbar to one vertical edge, where - like OS X's Dock - it naturally belongs. Screen height - vertical pixels - are too precious to waste on toolbars in these days of ubiquitous widescreens.

The taskbar is... Odd. All 3rd party system tray icons are hidden by default. You can manually choose some to be shown, or, as I have, just tell it to show all of them. There's little visible distinction between the analogues of QuickLaunch icons - "pinned items" in W7 parlance - and running apps. Icons flash when launched and ones denoting running apps have a frame; hovering the mouse pointer reveals the name or title and for running apps a thumbnail window preview.

It's a big change, but frankly not as disruptive as I expected. The influence of the Mac's Dock is painfully obvious, and it's neither as attractive or polished. It's not a rip-off - it's still the taskbar. Just. I'm not sure it's an improvement, but it does work.

The installer preloads a selection of wallpaper photos from the country chosen in the regional settings, so I got some ever-so-slightly cheesy but still pleasing photos of Stonehenge, Tower Bridge, the Giant's Causeway, some lakes and lochs & whatnot. Mac-like, they slowly cycle past. It's actually quite pleasant.

The control panel is still a Vista-like muddle of renamed entries - for instance, there are no "add & remove" applets. I had to hunt for "Programs and features". This will wind up XP migrants unmercifully, but it's still better than the XP control panel's "simple view". In the Programs & Features c-panel, it's straightforward to hide unwanted bundled apps like Media Player, but they're not removed, merely hidden. This I don't like - a concealed app can still be run & exploited, it's still taking disk space, registry entries and so on. I want the bits I don't use gone.

I still find the transparent window borders tacky and useless. The new show-desktop option is handy, reducing windows to a glowing rendered frame, but it's not even slightly close to the power of Apple's Exposé. I use an ancient IBM Model M keyboard, with no Windows keys, so I can't tell you if the 3D Flip window-selection thing still works. It too was pretty but useless, unlike Exposé, I though. If MS is so blatantly going to nick Apple ideas, can't it at least find a way to replicate the functionality, rather than just the visual glitz?

The desktop is more useful than ever before - and I include the abhorrent ActiveDesktop in that assessment - because now it's the home of "gadgets", the floaty-accessory things that lived in Vista's "sidebar", wasting screen space and CPU cycles. Now they float on your wallpaper, though if you like the clutter, you can set them to be transparent (in increments of 20%, which actually is a good simplification) and set them to be always on top. The CPU/RAM meter is quite useful, and I also have a calendar - which, annoyingly, only shows today, not the whole month - and a weather applet. On the whole, though, Google Desktop will give you that and the search functionality on XP just fine, for nothing. Nice but not actually particularly useful.

I really dislike the new Explorer. With tweaking it's possible to make it vaguely useful but frankly I don't find any of the changes an improvement and it's horribly slow and unresponsive. Give me the NT4 one with the web-folders turned off any day. Since then, it's only gone downhill. I feel that the file manager is one thing where you want no chrome at all, just lightning-fast responsiveness. This one is the opposite. It's a bit less uncooperative than Vista's, but on discussion with alexpiom, I think some of the issues I had with it were because of TinyVista, not Vista itself.

Overall, so far, after a few days, I'm grudgingly impressed. It's pretty and shiny, it works, it's much less of a resource hog, and it was easy to get going. I don't like the Explorer or the new Start menu, and generally it's still bigger and slower than I'd like, but I could use this.

And I daresay soon enough we all will. My money says that as soon as this thing ships, MS will ruthlessly and completely extirpate XP from the channel and from support, ASAP, and try to get all XP and Vista users over onto Win7 as fast as they possibly can. I expect some new must-have products, especially for the big corporates, that mandates Win7 in the near future.

Me personally? Well, I spent that extra few hours getting Win2K Pro current. SP4, drivers, Firefox, Flash, Java, RealAlternative, QuicktimeAlternative, AdBlock+, Privoxy, IE6, couple of rounds of WindowsUpdate. WinAmp, OpenOffice, Pidgin, and we're in business.

It boots in well under a minute - about a quarter of the time of W7 - is fast and responsive in use, all my preferred apps work fine and it goes like stink on this hardware. (To be fair, so did TinyXP, mind you. Complete with the MediaCentre "Royale" theme and all.)

Given the choice of only one of the two, I'd have to go for W2K, I think.

But I shall be back to Ubuntu, shortly, for the 9.04 upgrade... And there I think I will be staying, for the most part.