Windows 7

 Computing, OS, Windows  No Responses »
Dec 072009
 

Yes, I still play CoD4.

Yes, I still play CoD4.

I recently upgraded my PC from Windows Vista to Windows 7. I got Vista when it came out, and I sometimes feel like I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t hate Vista. Yes, I like it. Never had a beef with it. I even stood up for it when people were so quick to put it down. Anyway, enough of that, this article is about Windows Vista Service Pack 3 7.
I must admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by the new features over Vista. Of course, anyone migrating from XP to 7 will notice a couple more improvements. The most obvious new addition when logged in is the revamped taskbar. Merging the functionality of the quick launch and the taskbar program buttons is a great idea, which I understand started out in Linux. Aero-peak, which is called by hovering over the show desktop button is kinda cool, but not really that useful. Aero Shake is a little more handy though, grab a window and shake it to minimize all other windows.
A really useful feature is Aero Snap, something that seems so obvious it feels like it should have been in Windows 98. Drag a window to the left or right side of the screen, and it fills the entire half of the screen – makes transferring files between two locations much, much simpler. Drag a window to the top to maximise it, but I prefer the good ol’ double-click the title bar option.
So those are the main aesthetic changes, another big improvement is performance. Starting up and shutting down is ridiculously fast. As in “wait, did that shut down properly?” fast. It’s awesome, and it’s the way technology should be going. The UAC prompt that pops up when there’s a potential security vulnerability also appears much quicker, and I’ve noticed appears less often than it did with Vista – so that’ll cheer a few people up.
There are many other improvements, but I reckon these are the main points. Since I’ve been using Vista for so long, I’ve felt it improve over time, and moving to Windows 7 isn’t much of a leap at all. The speed improvement is always welcome, and the new features are handy to have, too. But if Vista annoyed you, I can’t see Windows 7 being any better. My advice is to grin and bear it, Windows 7 is not a bad OS by any means.

 Posted by Phil at 19:51  Tagged with: , ,

Managing two network connections in Linux – one crossover, one LAN

 Computing, Linux, Tips, Windows  No Responses »
Oct 192009
 

I had a little bit of trouble with this recently, and thought I’d might as well post the solution. I have two computers, both using a wireless connection. One runs Linux Mint, the other runs Windows Vista. I wanted to use Synergy on both machines so that I only had to use one mouse and one keyboard. I got that working easily enough, but over wireless it was a bit choppy, sometimes a little unresponsive.
“I know what to do,” I said. “I’ll fix it with a good ol’ crossover cable” (I didn’t really, I just used a regular cable, network cards are smarter than they used to be). As simple as that it was not! Mint wanted to use the wired connection for all traffic. When I had the cable plugged in, I could not access the internet. Sure, I could have shared the network through Windows, but I wanted a more elegant solution… Here is what I did to get it all working.

  • Give the wired network adapters manual IP addresses in a different subnet to the wireless connection – in my case, the wireless connection was a class C subnet (see this Wikipedia article for more information on subnets), so I opted for a class B subnet for the wired interface. Looking at the Wikipedia article, that would give them a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0. I gave the interfaces IPs of 128.0.0.1 and 128.0.0.2. Default gateways and DNS servers do not matter here.
  • This is the bit I had trouble with. In the Mint Connection Manager, select the wired connection and go to IPv4 Settings, and click the Routes button.
  • Add an entry and enter the address that the wireless adapter has, and use the router address as the Gateway

Sorted! Mint will now use the wired connection for Synergy, and wireless for internet/network stuff.

 Posted by Phil at 10:07  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Dual booting Mint/Vista, with a shared data partition

 Computing, Linux, OS, Windows  No Responses »
Sep 282009
 

A very dark mint

My new Mint setup

I’m afraid not all is well in the world of Linux. Too many issues with my laptop have caused me to half-revert to Windows. I kinda missed running Eve on it. Anyway, I had most of a tutorial written up on how to repartition your hard disk so you can run Linux and Windows on the same drive, as well as having a shared data partition. But it turns out that the Linux Mint installer can do all that for you! If only I’d known that when I did it, I wouldn’t have wasted time writing up a tutorial :P
Ah well, there you go.
Just so this post isn’t a total loss, I’ll say that Linux handles NTFS perfectly these days, so you’d do good to make your shared drive NTFS if you plan to have one.
And I’ll RTFM next time.

–Edit
Y’know what? I’ll post it anyway! Manual partition resizing a-go-go! This tutorial assumes that Windows is already installed. The Linux Mint Live CD will be used as I know it has GParted on it.
This tutorial is aimed at beginners, and doesn’t explore using multiple partitions for the Linux install. At the least, you may want to put the /home directory on its own partition, but there are plenty of sources of information out there that can advise you on a good Linux partition setup.

  1. Considering Partitions Sizes

    2. This should be the first thing you do. Start with the essentials – the shared data partition, for storing documents for use between operating systems. I set mine to 5Gb, I doubt I’ll need more than that at any one time. I can always chuck files onto a network drive, but you may need more if you’re storing music or something. The second essential, and this one’s easier to figure out, is the Linux swap partition. It should be the equivalent of double your computer’s RAM. So for my 2Gb RAM, I gave it 4Gb. Simples! Now the tricky part – how much to allocate to Windows and Linux? Well, you should know how much you have left now. Depending on what you plan to do with your installations, this is up to you. Windows generally needs a lot more room than Linux, and I like to play games on Windows on my laptop, which takes up a heck of a lot more space. So I rationed out 50Gb to Windows and 15Gb to Linux – and yes, Windows still uses a far greater percentage of the space than Linux does. But like I say, it’s up to you to figure out how much you’ll think you’ll need. It’s very easy to resize partitions later using GParted anyway. Just remember that your hard disk’s capacity will always be a little less than what’s stated on the label! On to the resizing!

  2. Resize the Partitions
    • The first thing you should do is to run a defrag in Windows. Tedious, I know, but it’ll reduce the risk of anything going wrong when you resize the Windows partition. That said, I didn’t bother, but I wasn’t overly fussed about goosing the Windows installation. Surprisingly, it actually turned out alright! But still, defrag, and backup what you need. Saves tears later.
    • Boot into the Mint LiveCD – using the LiveCD ensures that none of the partitions are locked by an operating system on the disk.
    • Go to Menu->All applications->Administration and select Partition Editor. GParted will open, and will show the current partition layout on one of your hard drives. Use the drop-down menu at the top right to select the physical disk to partition. Also, see that Apply button? Any modifications you make now will not be committed until you click that button.
    • Resize the Windows partition to a desired size. Make sure it is still to the left-hand side of the disk (position is important if you need to resize later).
    • If the Windows partition is contained within an Extended partition, great! Otherwise, some planning may be required. Disks should only have up to four primary partitions. A primary partition is one that is not inside an extended partition (extended partitions are also primary partitions). Any more than four could cause problems. Extended partitions contain logical partitions, and you can have loads of them within one extended partitions. It’s just the number of primary partitions that is the limitation. Anyway, you should add an extended partition to the rest of the free space, assuming you do not already have four primary partitions. If you do, you’ll have to figure that one out yourself I’m afraid!
    • We’re going to add the Linux Swap partition. Inside the extended partition, click the New button. Specify the size of the swap, and change the File System to linux-swap. Make sure the partition is moved to the far right-hand side of the available space. Label it appropriately (‘Swap’?), and click the Add button.
    • Now to add the shared partition. I used NTFS, because Linux can handle NTFS very well these days, and of course, so can Windows. As with the previous step, click the New button, specify the size, and this time set the File System to ntfs (or fat32, if you’d prefer for whatever reason). Again, drag it to the far right-hand side, label it, and click the Add button.
    • The remaining space will be used for Linux. It will sit between the Windows partition, and the ‘fixed’ partitions. The reason for this is that if you decide that Windows could do with more space, the Linux partition can be shrunk, or vice versa. Add another partition in the empty space by selecting the extended partition, and clicking the New button. Use all the space. Why not? That’s what it’s there for. Set the File System to ext3 (or if you’re feeling brave/know that your Linux will support it, go for ext4 – it should be worth it!), label it, and click the Add button.
    • The main screen will now show how your disk will be arranged. If you’re happy with it, click the Apply button, make a cup of tea, and watch some Stargate. Otherwise, make the changes as appropriate.
  3. …Oops, not finished this article. I’ll come back to it!
 Posted by Phil at 21:18  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
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