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Well over my reading week I decided to make the transition to Windows Vista. I had recently been running Ubuntu Edgy exclusively on my desktop, but decided that I wanted to see what Vista was all about. I picked up a copy of Home Premium (Legally!), and installed it on my box. I must say that I was very impressed with the changes to the Windows Installer. The image based install went smoothly and I was up and running in just over 30 minutes.

Once Vista booted everything just worked, I didnt’ need to download any drivers everything was done for me, which was a pleasant change from what I remember installing when I last installed Windows XP. Although Vista doesn’t have any services packs yet I think this will eventually change but we will see.

I was concerned about how my box would handle Vista, my computer is by no means old, but at the same time it’s definitely not bleeding edge. Currently I am running 1.86gz Centrino Processor with 1gb of PC3200 Ram, and an 80gb Sata Drive with a 120gb IDE storage drive, and I have an AGP 6600GT Nvidia Video card. Vista actually runs quite nicely on this setup. The overal experience seems very “snappy” everything opens quickly, and my memory usage is usually between 500-750mbs of my overall 1gb. I did however make the upgrade to 2gb recently just to give myself that extra “room” just incase.

Overall I really do enjoy the UI changes that have been made, and with the system in general. The search improvements are a blessing, and it’s nice to just type what I’m looking for in any window and have it just come up. Overall the Vista Eye Candy is nice, but is by no means as good as Beryl in Linux, however I do find that it is a lot more stable.

I really enjoy the integration of windows media player and the improvements they have made to it. I was always a fan of windows media player when I used windows. I liked it’s small memory footprint, library folder watching, the only thing I didn’t ever really like was the UI and they have definitely improved in that department.

All things considered if would definitely recommend anyone who is still running windows xp to go out and make the switch. I find that Vista has given me a reason to enjoy windows again, for now, but that definitely does not mean I spend a lot of time in it. I still use Linux as my main OS and would say I’m in that at least 85% of the time.

So yeah I guess that’s my pseudo review of Vista. I hope it helps some people make the decision to make the switch.

I almost forgot here’s a screenshot

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What vi would look like if Microsoft had developed it

There’s no where to run and hide from the vi assistant!

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Well I came across this absolutely hilarious video on youtube that really spoke to me. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m seriously going out of my mind from lack of sleep and stress, or maybe it’s because I’m taking an operating system course this semester so some of the things this guy spits really speak to me. Whatever it is this has to be one of the funniest, geek, gansta raps of all time. This guy’s name is Monzy and if you checkout youtube you’ll find a wealth of other just as funny raps. “I do a bounds check before I write to an array”! Foo!

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OK finally Adobe has decided to release Flash Player 9 in Beta Form for Linux. I’ve decided to throw together a quick how to on how to install it on Ubuntu Edgy. This should hold true however for most flavours of Ubuntu as well.

1. Open Synaptic Package manager
2. Click on the search button and type “Flash”
3. Click the box beside any of the currently installed flash-plugins, this should be flashplugin-nonfree, and select for a complete removal
4. Now click apply and let Synaptic remove the package
5. We are now ready to download and install the flashplayer 9 plugin
6. Point your browser to “http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html”, and select the “Download Installer for Linux” link. Remember where you save this file because we’ll need it next. Close down your browser when you are done since we don’t want it open while we install the plugin
7. Open your favourite terminal and navigate to the directory which you saved the plugin, and execute the following command:

tar -vxzf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz

8. You will now have a directory called flash-player-plugin-9.0.1.21.55 or something similar, navigate to this directory
9. You will now need to copy the library “libflashplayerplugin.so” to “/usr/lib/firefox/plugins/”, execute the following command:

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

10. Navigate to your favourite flash enabled website and enjoy having the latest and greatest flash player.

I hope this helps, please post if you have any problems or further questions. I hope this helps everyone out.

Update …
Treviño from Ubuntu Forums was kind enough to pack the player into a package. You can now get the files from his repository at http://3v1n0.tuxfamily.org/dists/dapper/3v1n0/

Download the deb and install it

kungfuice Computers, Technology, Ubuntu

If you have been noticing messages in your logs about unknown key presses I’ve found a solution that gets rid of them.

I had been getting messages like this in my messages log and wanted to get rid of them

kernel: [17204628.240000] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, ode 0xd9 on isa0060/serio0).
[17204628.240000] atkbd.c: Use ’setkeycodes e059 keycode’ to make it known.

[17204603.280000] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0×81 on isa0060/serio0).
[17204603.280000] atkbd.c: Use ’setkeycodes e001 keycode keycode’ to make it know.

These errors were randomly generated when I used any keys on my keyboard. There are documented cases of having similar problems with media keys on laptops but nothing to do with regular keys.

I decided that since I was not having any problems using my keyboard that I would simply assign these keys to some empty key code to appease the system.

This is how you do it:
Edit The File:”/usr/share/hotkey-setup/generic.hk”

sudo gedit /usr/share/hotkey-setup/generic.hk

Place these lines in the file, remember to use the values of the keys that appear in your logs, don’t just copy and paste

setkeycodes e059 254
setkeycodes e001 255

Now simply restart the hotkey init script by doing:

sudo /etc/init.d/hotkey-setup restart

Voila those messages should stop appearing in your logs

kungfuice Computers, Technology, Ubuntu