Aren’t you really really glad that you spent that extra money for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition so that you could get all these Ultimate Extras every, hmm, 12 months or so? I really really wanted these extra DreamScenes and SoundScenes (ok, that is new, but do I really care since I usually have my speakers turned off to avoid all that Windows beeping and booping). These extras became available last week (April 22) according to Windows Update. They are optional installs. So, you need to manually select them from the Vista Windows Update window.
Archive for April, 2008
New April 2008 Vista Ultimate Extras… Ho Hum
Sunday, April 27th, 2008Western Digital MyBook External Drive Has a EULA???
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
I just picked up a Western Digital MyBook Home Edition 500GB USB/Firewire drive to back up files on my PC. Plugged into a PC running Windows Vista and the EULA window you see above popped up. I have no idea what WD wants to put on my drive, but it is not going to happen. I’m reformatting the drive as a NTFS partition right now (it came formatted as FAT32).
Ubuntu 8.04LTS vs. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
Friday, April 25th, 2008
I downloaded Ubuntu Linux 8.04LTS and tried to install it on an old Dell Latitude L400 that I’ve tested previous Ubuntu versions on. The installation seemed to proceed normally. However, it took forever to boot up after the installation completed. And, after the login, the desktop appeared, then disappered leaving only a blank black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. I guessed that Ubuntu had finally become too bloated for the 256MB RAM notebook. And, yes, I’ve tried Xubuntu. It didn’t work correctly on the L400.
Next, I tried installing it as a Guest OS under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on a Dell Latitude D620 notebook. Virtual PC doesn’t like current generation Linux distros and 8.04 felt its wrath. So, I searched the web and found this detailed item on the Arcane Code blog…
Installing Ubuntu 8.04 under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
The steps in the blog body didn’t work for me. However, there were comments that provided additional information. The additional instruction was to press F6 to add additional options and add…
noapic nolapic vga=791
…to its option line and before the terminating double dashes (–). Be sure to leave a space between “791″ and the terminating “–”. The next step is to be very very patient. The installation process (I installed from a physical CD-ROM burned from the ISO) takes a long long time and mostly blank screens (first black and later beige) before anything interesting appears in the Virtual PC window. However, at some point the Ubuntu graphical desktop shows up with the warning window shown above. This is still the Live CD mode. Clicking the Install icon fires up the CD again resulting in another long delay before anything happens.
If you forget to make the changes to the kernel boot options like I did, you can apply them temporarily from the Grub menu and then make them permanent by editing the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Downloaded and tried out…
…on Windows Server 2003 R2 in a virtual machine (the only safe way to test stuff like this). Windows Update didn’t work after the installation. Fortunately, I remembered that IE8 has an IE7 emulation mode. Turning this on let me use Windows Update from IE8.
ZDNet: In Web world of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop
Monday, April 7th, 2008I just read about three bloggers who died recently over at…
In Web world of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop
I don’t blog for a living. But, I do blog and write quite a bit. I blog regularly for O’Reilly Media and try to regularly update my personal blogs. And, a bunch of Windows Mobile articles were just published over on the Microsoft.com Windows Mobile site. Over the past few months, I decided to cut back writing on my personal blogs just to get a bit of time back for other things. What used to be 6 or 7 posts per blog per week is probably down to 4 posts per week.
For those who think blogging full time might be the way to go, read the article. Maybe your day job isn’t so bad after all…
Take it easy out there fellow bloggers…
AMD Processors with Virtualization Feature
Sunday, April 6th, 2008I could never figure out which AMD processors have the AMD-V virtualization assist feature. Search AMD’s website for this information proved futile. Fortunately, I read a Microsoft newsgroup post where a Virtual Machines MVP provide a link to a Wikipedia entry that provides this information. Here’s the link to that Wikipedia page…