How to upgrade to a bigger SSD

Okay, on a 17" HP Envy, here's how to upgrade from a small SSD to a new SSD:

1. Make a Windows system repair disk via the control panel's Backup/Restore item.
2. Put the new SSD into an external USB case
3. Boot into a Linux live CD that supports your hardware, and dd the internal drive to the external drive.
4. Unplug the external drive, reboot back into Windows.
5. Now to extend the partitions on the new drive so you have your new C:. Plug in the external drive, run Easus Partition Master and move your rescue and tools partitions to the end of the drive and resize your C: partition on the new drive.
6. Shutdown the system
7. Remove the old SSD from the computer, replace it with the new SSD.
8. Boot into the repair disk. It'll then whine that your boot needs repairing. Let it.
9. Boot into the system, and then go to the control panel's 'System' item. Select "System Protection", then scroll down to the end of the list and you'll see something that says "C: (Unavailable)" that says System Protection is enabled. Click on it, then click "Configure", then "Disable".
10. Click your new "C:" partition, select 'Enable', then whatever percentage you want to enable for System Restore snapshots.

There you go. All done.

Adding certificates for Windows 8 Mail

I run my own email server and of course SSL-encrypt both imap and smtp, but have a self-signed certificate, not a certification authority signed certificate. Outlook has no problem with that -- it whines about the certificate, but then gives me a dialog where I can import it. Once I import it, fine. But I don't have Outlook installed on my Windows 8 evaluation for a variety of reasons. So I tried Windows 8 Mail and rather than offer to import the certificates, I got a message that I needed to contact my system administrator to import some certificates. Erm, I *am* my system administrator! Hrm. So...

My email server is running Debian "squeeze" Linux with Exim4 as the smtp server and dovecot as the imap server. The first thing I needed to do was verify on the mail server that there were valid (self-signed) certificates for both exim4 and dovecot. This can be done with:

• openssl x509 -in some.crt -text -noout

This will give you a bunch of information about the certificate, so you may wish to pipe it to 'less'.

The exim4 certificate was expired so I regenerated it with:

• /usr/share/doc/exim4-base/examples/exim-gencert --force

So then I located the two certificates:

• Dovecot - /etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem
• Exim4 - /etc/exim4/exim.crt

I downloaded the two certificates to my Windows 8 system via sftp and renamed the dovecot certificate from dovecot.pem to dovecot.crt . The next thing I did was open the Microsoft Management Console by pressing Windows-R and typing 'mmc'. I then selected Add/Manage Snapons, and selected to add the Certificates snapon.

Next, open up the Certificates tree until you see "Trusted Root Certification Authorities" and open it up to see "Certificates" underneath it. Right-click on Certificates and click "All Tasks" then "Import". Import your two certificates and there you are -- now all your self-signed certificates coming from your email server look as valid as any certificates, and are accepted by Windows 8 Mail just fine.

So, uhm... why does Microsoft make this so hard? I dunno, they're Microsoft, I guess. But the "ask your system administrator" is just BS, because Windows 8 Mail will *never* be used by anybody who actually has a system administrator other than themselves -- all businesses will be using Outlook Mail as their email client for a number of reasons. Oh well, just another example of how Windows 8 is half-baked and characterized by an utter lack of understanding of, well, actual customers.

-ELG

Windows 8 and taste

One thing about most geeks that I've noticed: They have horrible taste. You can look at their homes, their clothes, their cars, the trinkets scattered about their cubicles, it's all a horrible mishmash of ugly. The way that Apple addressed this was via the Stalinesque concept of the Chief Designer. You may laugh at that description, but the Soviet-era Soyuz rocket and space capsule, designed under the supervision of Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, are still flying today fifty years after their design process began because he had exactly the same kind of qualifications as Apple's Chief Designer -- good engineering taste that balanced simplicity, cost, performance, and capability into a pleasing whole.

What brings this to mind is Windows 8, which I'm using to type this while eval'ing the RTM product. I'm not disclosing any NDA stuff here, it's pretty much the same product you downloaded earlier as the "Consumer Preview" with a few pieces of missing functionality filled in (and undoubtedly many bugs fixed). Windows 8 is Microsoft's attempt to re-invent the user interface, but fails primarily because of two reasons: A lack of courage, and a lack of that chief designer.

The lack of courage part is where Microsoft flinched at the notion of completely re-inventing the desktop. As a result, they have the "classic" desktop available by hitting a button on the "Modern" desktop. The end result is a bizarre mishmash of two different desktop environments in one, twice the amount of stuff to learn if you're a user because the "Classic" desktop environment doesn't *exactly* work the same as the well-known Windows 7 desktop environment, while the "Modern" desktop... well, it's entirely different, period. Twice the amount for end users to learn is user environment fail, period.

The lack of that chief designer, however, shows even more in the design of the "Modern" desktop. A good design is clean, looks simple (even if it isn't), everything's laid out in an obvious manner, there's a limited number of things for end users to learn in order to be productive, and, for lack of a better word, it is tasteful. It doesn't look like a mishmash of unrelated ideas from multiple independent teams all smashed together into one product.

That, however, doesn't describe the "Modern" desktop at all. One of the things I noted about Gnome 3 was that you had to basically know one gesture -- how to move your mouse pointer to the top left of the screen (or touch the top left of the screen on a touchscreen) -- to make it useful to you. Everything else is pretty obvious touch an icon or touch and drag an icon (or the click-on and click-on-and-drag with a mouse) or scroll up and down using the mouse wheel or two fingers. With the "Modern" desktop, every single corner of the screen does something -- and does something *different* (with the exception of the right-hand corners, which does something the *same*). Furthermore, moving to a corner, waiting for the hover timeout, then moving your mouse up and down does something even *different*. And right-clicking does something even *more* different. The confusing number of things you can do, indeed, need to know how to do to make the environment useful, are well past the three things you need to know how to do to use Gnome 3.

In essence, it's as if a bunch of geeks got together and decided to take every idea from every touchscreen environment ever created anywhere, and put them all into the same user interface. It's as if every geek critic of Gnome 3's tasteful design got together and designed their perfect touchscreen environment with every feature they could think of. It's as if Larry Wall designed the thing. Folks, Perl is many things, but clean and easy to use are not among those things -- it's an ugly, nasty, piece of work that will spit you in the eye if you look at it wrong just like the camel on the cover of the definitive book on the language. Like said camel it also happens to be very useful (thus why I wrote the virtualization management infrastructure for our virtualized product line in Perl, because it was the most reasonable way to parse the output of all the low-level virtualization-related utilities that the various virtualization systems use for their low-level management), but nobody has ever suggested that end users be given Perl as their user interface to their computers.

So the question is, will Windows 8 succeed? Well, define "success". The majority of personal computers in the world next year will ship with Windows 8 pre-installed. And because everything in post-Gates Microsoft is an API and Microsoft is quite open with their API's (Apple, not Microsoft, is the "Do Evil" company in the post-Gates era), sooner or later someone is going to come up with a means to tame this mess. But I have to say that Windows 8 is, in the end, a disappointment to me. Microsoft had an opportunity to re-define how personal computers worked, and they have all the pieces needed in Windows 8 to do so. They just needed a tasteful Chief Designer with the power to impose order and taste upon this mess -- and, alas, it appears they have no Jon Ives or Sergei Korolev to do so.

-ELG

Sound, Flash, and VMware Player

This is some notes on how to get sound and flash working on a Scientific Linux 64-bit guest ( rebranded Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 ) running inside VMware Player on Windows 7 64-bit:

Flash: Note that Chrome for 64-bit Linux does *not* include the integrated Flash player that all other platforms have. You'll need to download 64-bit Flash beta from Adobe. At the time of this writing, that's at Adobe Labs. Once you extract the tgz file, you'll be left with a file "libflashplayer.so", simply copy it to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins , restart Chrome or Firefox, and you're set.

Sound: VMware's sound system crashes with the default Ubuntu / Red Hat sound configuration. This is apparently because VMware doesn't bother emulating all pieces of the hardware they say they're emulating, and when ALSA touches the missing bits, VMware disables the sound device. That's easy enough to fix though. From the Gnome menu, go to System->Preferences->Sound. In the Sound preferences, click on Hardware. Change the profile at the bottom from "Analog Stereo Duplex" to "Analog Stereo Output". Then on the little icon of the speaker on the bottom margin of the VMware Player, right-click it and select "Connect". After about a minute it'll turn green and you'll be able to play sound again.

Why this happens: Though the Ensoniq device emulated is capable of stereo duplex operation (i.e., both recording and outputting at the same time), I know because I actually had one of the physical cards back in the day and used it for that purpose along with a multitrack recorder program, VMware's emulation of the device is not capable of such and thus you must disable that capability. Unless you were intending to record audio within the Linux virtual machine (*not* recommended, VMware's timing is not sufficiently good to get good results there), this has no actual effect -- you can still play Flash videos from Chrome (and Firefox presumably) and hear the sound.

So if you're running Windows 7 on your physical hardware because you need the graphics performance for games and aren't willing to do the dual-card IOMMU hack with Xen that I demonstrated previously (or your hardware simply doesn't have IOMMU support, or you're not willing to use the latest bleeding-edge OpenSUSE as your platform), you can still have the far more secure web browsing environment of Linux available, and with VMware Player you can give Linux any additional drives beyond your boot drive for Linux to manage. Linux works far better as a server than Windows 7 does -- it can provide CIFS, AFP, iSCSI, and do it all on a much better software RAID stack than Microsoft's, as well as using LVM to manage that space, for which Windows 7 has no equivalent. And VMware's Unity system actually works pretty well with SL6/RHEL6 on Windows, although not as well as it works in VMware Fusion on MacOS (the issue being that the little Unity menu icon gets put into the screen menu bar on MacOS and has a native look and feel, while shows up as a clunky little usually-invisible icon above the Start menu on Windows). Which means that you can mix Linux Chrome windows, Windows IE windows (ick! But there's a couple of applications I need for customer support that requires IE plugins that don't exist for any other browser), Linux shell windows, and hoary old Outlook all on the same screen and manage them using the normal Aero Peek icons at the bottom or, if you have a Logitech mouse with the Logitech drivers installed, by assigning one of the side buttons to Window Switcher (their clone of Apple's Expose'). And unlike earlier versions of Windows, Windows 7 is stable -- in fact, I've never managed to make it crash. It's just very annoying... but that's why Apple is still in business, after all. Because Apple makes computers that are not annoying. For a price. A big price, alas...

-ELG

Bizarre Windows behavior

Some bizarre things I've seen with Windows 7 Ultimate thus far:

1. No loopback device. I had an ISO of Office 2010 on my network share, I copied it over to Windows 7 and... err... now what? I ended up exporting it to the Linux virtual machine as a virtual CD, mounting it in the Linux VM, then re-exporting it via Samba to Windows as a share.
2. Windows 7 won't browse my workgroup. No way, no how. I can go directly to the Run prompt and type in "\\linserver\office" and get my Office share, but it won't automagically populate its network neighborhood thingy in the left margin of Windows Explorer with my workgroup shares. It's not that Samba is misconfigured. My MacBook properly populates *its* left margin with the Samba server and expands to show the shares when I click on it, as well as showing the share I exported from Windows 7.f
3. Windows 7 won't do a thing when I click "Map Network Drive". Nothing. Nada. I remember that in the Xen installation of Windows 7 it certainly worked fine, it popped up a dialogue and all that, but now that it's native nothing -- zero -- happens when I click on that item.
4. Probably related to Homegroups. This is the only Windows 7 system on my network, so Homegroups is utterly useless. I attempt to change it and... nada. Nothing. Won't let me leave the homegroup.

Computers are supposed to be deterministic. Windows 7 isn't -- its behavior appears to be semi-random, operating upon a logic that Boole and Von Neumann would not have recognized. So have you had weird things happen with Windows 7? Curious penguins want to know!

-ELG

Windows virtualization software

Previously I mentioned three bare metal hypervisor solutions -- Xen, KVM, and VMware ESXi -- and what was required to push through a video card to a WIndows VM living on those hypervisors. I have since managed to get that working with VMware ESXi, and I suspect if I install the very latest Fedora 14 host it'll work with KVM too.

That works fine with a desktop machine or rack server where I can mount multiple video cards into the box. The performance of Windows 7 virtualized is indistinguishable from Windows 7 raw. Here are my scores for Windows 7 raw on that box, with a Seagate Momentus XT 7200 RPM boot drive (due to the front-loading slot on my case that allows easy swapping of OS drives):

• Processor: 7.5
• Memory: 7.6
• Graphics: 7.3
• Gaming graphics: 7.3
• Primary hard disk: 5.9

Compare with the virtualized numbers.

The problem, however, is when you want to go mobile. You simply can't add a second video card to a laptop. So if I want to play games on one of those new Dell Sandy Bridge desktop-replacement laptops, I need to run WIndows native, and come up with a way to have Linux also running and handling my years of accumulated data, all of which is in a Unix filesystem tree and cannot simply be copied into Windows. I preferably want this Linux to be running on a raw partition -- not on a file within a Windows partition -- and it has to be able to access raw Linux-formated USB and SATA drives. So, let's look at the first candidate... VMware Player

VMware Player is VMware's entry level desktop virtualization program. At one point in time VMware player would only start up virtual machines that had been created by VMware Workstation, but now it's an almost full version of VMware Workstation with various functionality like snapshots stripped out and with a limitation of only four cores allowed. VMware Player is "free" -- it's free for personal use, if you want to deploy it in a corporate environment you can license it for a fairly trivial per-seat fee (quite trivial, it'll be lost in the noise of your IT budget).

The test machine is my Xen server with Windows 7 installed as described above. I installed VMware Server on it without any problem. I created my Scientific Linux 6.0 virtual machine with no problem, giving it 2 gigabytes of memory and a 16gb root filesystem. VMware Tools installed easily into SL6 and allowed me to treat the Linux "X" desktop as if it were just any other Windows window, I could click into it, my mouse pointer could be moved outside of the window while I was typing into Linux program, and so forth. Adding the two 2TB SATA physical hard drives to the virtual machine was as simple as point and click, though the VM had to be off to do so because VMware Player's hot-plug functionality apparently does not work with physical drives. Once I booted SL6 up, it saw the two 2TB drives and assembled the Linux software RAID arrays on it automagically, though I had to do vgchange -a -y to get SL6 to recognize the LVM volumes on the RAID arrays.

So how fast is access to those two SATA drives? On a subsequent reboot of my Linux VM, a RAID check got fired off. The two drives were being read at 105MB/sec apiece -- 210MB/sec total -- and it used less than 20% of one of my eight cores for VMware to virtualize this. My take on it is that VMware Player's fake SCSI device takes a fair chunk of CPU to virtualize, but modern multi-core CPU's are so bleepin' fast that you won't even notice (which I didn't, until I went to see).

The final thing I wanted to do was to export a NTFS-formatted volume to Windows via iSCSI. Windows 7 has Microsoft's iSCSI initiator built in. I gave both my Windows machine and my Linux VM fixed addresses (using the bridged mode for the Linux VM's virtual network card), and installed the iSCSI target daemon and utils with 'yum install scsi-target-utils'. Then I added the already existing logical volume /dev/datagroup/win7 volume to /etc/volumes/targets.conf (see that file for exact format of what you need to add) and started up the daemon with "service tgtd start". Then I went to the Windows Administrative Tools (you can get to them from the the Start Menu if you've configured them to appear there, or from the Control Panel), selected the iSCSI Initiator, told it to scan the IP address of my Linux VM, and voila, it popped up there and as a drive letter in the Windows Finder. Easy peasy! The only thing to remember is to poke a hole for iSCSI in both the Linux and Windows firewalls, or it doesn't work :). (Yes, been there, done that, heh!).

The final test was to attach a USB hard drive to the system and export it to my MacBook Pro via iSCSI and use it as a Time Machine device. When I attached the hard drive to the system, it popped up in Windows, but clicking Virtual Machine ->Removable Devices showed the new drive, and allowed me to add it to the virtual machine. I then added it to targets.conf and told the tgd daemon about it, then went to my iSCSI initiator on the MacBook (the globalSAN iSCSI initiator) and added it, then used Disk Utility to format it as a Mac volume. Then I went to Time Machine and told Time Machine to use it for backup, and... voila. It started backing up at about 20mb/sec -- or about 50% of theoretical USB2 speed, not too bad considering this is being done via WiFi, not a direct connection, and the iSCSI target is running in a virtual machine, not directly on the hardware. A copy in Windows of a 4GB file to a similar USB drive ran at 26mb/sec, and that should go faster than Time Machine writes because it's a big sequential write, not a lot of smaller files. So now I have the equivalent of one of those expensive Time Capsule thingies, except that a 2TB Western Digital drive in an external USB case costs a *lot* less! Why an external USB? Simple -- so if I ever have to restore my MacBook Pro after a disk crash (which has happened before), I can unplug it from my big server and plug it directly into the MBP for MacOS to restore the system back to pre-crash state.

So... it's clear that VMware Player will do everything I want it to do here. There's two more options to look at before calling this competition done, however: Oracle's VirtualBox, which recently released a brand new version (version 4.0.4), and Microsoft's own Windows Virtual PC, which doesn't officially support Linux but which has been made to do so. More on those later...

-ELG

Surviving with Windows

Even the most fervent Linux penguin may be required to use Windows for some purpose or another. For example, I have been doing a lot of work with VMware VSphere lately. And VSphere Client runs on... err... *WINDOWS*. Then there's games. Linux gaming is a non-starter due to the fact that the "X" Window System simply doesn't have the performance to do games. Mac gaming is better now that Steam has arrived, but Windows is still "the" PC gaming platform for most games.

So if you have to use Windows, what makes it less stressful for someone who prefers more elegant operating systems than the 16 years of hacks and kludges that is Windows today? I'll make a brief list here...

1. Microsoft Security Essentials. Don't even think of running Windows without an antivirus. This program is free, works as well as the others, and does *not* spam you or install spyware on your system like many of the other antivirus programs do.
2. Google Chrome. Internet Explorer on Windows 7 is a lot more secure than in days of yore, but Google Chrome is the most secure web browser for Windows, period.
3. Microsoft Office 2010, Standard version. It drives me batty with its incoherent user interface but Outlook still is the best here. However, if you do *not* need compatibility with Exchange Server and its calendar, install OpenOffice and Thunderbird instead -- their user interface is much better than Office 2010's.
4. Apple Quicktime. For playing Quicktime videos. Duh.
5. Foxit Reader for Windows. For reading PDF files, which is what everybody's documentation is sent out as nowadays. Do *NOT* install Adobe's own PDF reader, it is evil, it has a security breach every other day.
6. On the other hand, there's no alternative to Adobe's own Flash Player. Though thankfully Chrome doesn't need it, but IE will, so go ahead and install it -- using IE, because the installer will complain that Chrome already has Flash (duh).
7. GNU Emacs for Windows. Because sometimes you need to edit text files, and Emacs is the best way to do that.
8. Xmarks. The best way to keep all your bookmarks in sync between Chrome, IE, and any other computers you have.
9. Evernote, to write things like shopping lists and todo lists and keep your notes in sync with your smartphone, your tablet, and the cloud.
10. Steam client. Of course :).

To be continued...

Note one of the things I did *not* mention: Cygwin. The reality is that it will constantly annoy you due to the fact that the Unix API doesn't map well onto the Windows API. You're using Windows, not Unix. You're much better off learning how to use the native Windows tools like Powershell. They will annoy you too, but not as much as trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.

-ELG

Attack of the Linux Penguins

Recently I've been using Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx as my desktop development system. This is the first time in a long time that I've used Linux on the desktop -- for the past three years I've been using MacOS on the desktop, sharing the source code tree via NFS to a Linux VMware client to do compiles and testing. Since what I've been principally doing during this time is appliance and distribution design, the fact that VMware is not the speediest of environments did not make much difference.

However, I needed more virtual machines to look at potential client configurations than I could easily fit on a Macbook Pro, even the very well endowed Macbook Pro that I own (which has 8 gigabytes of memory), so clearly I needed to throw more hardware at the problem (heh! Typical software engineer answer!). So I installed 10.04 on a well-endowed desktop/server system complete with RAID5 array and 8GB of RAM, and set out to configure clients using the KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) system that comes with Ubuntu 10.04.

So, the Good:

1. KVM rocks. The performance I get out of KVM is far superior to anything I've ever experienced with VMware even on faster hardware. I am currently running a load on my system that would have both cores maxed out under VMware due to VMware's per-VM overhead. Under KVM, I'm at around 30% on both cores.
2. The Virtual Machine Manager that ships with Ubuntu for managing KVM is far easier to use than the latest editions of VMware Server's management UI, but not as good as the VMware Fusion management UI on MacOS in that it doesn't have any equivalent, as far as I can tell, of the VMware Tools module that allows transparent window pointer moves between the KVM virtual screen window and the host OS screen.
3. Gibber is a really cool Twitter/Facebook/etc. client, easily as good as anything on MacOS. I especially like its multi-pane capabilities for viewing multiple streams in parallel.
4. Performance in general rocks. It feels snappy and things happen quickly, even though it's running software RAID5 so you'd expect significant overhead from the disk driver. But there isn't -- Linux's cache-block elevator does very well at optimizing RAID access.

Now for the bad:

1. The user interface in general is reminiscent of mid-1990's Windows. It looks and feels dated and obsolete, and lacks many of the modern navigational aids of Windows 7 or MacOS 10.5.
2. While I got multi-screen support working for two displays attached to my nVidia 7900 video card (which has two outputs), the dated UI gives no easy way to navigate between the various applications open on the two screens. The window boxes clustered at the bottom of the leftmost screen are not easily accessible from the rightmost screen, and there's no equivalent of Apple's Expose' or Windows 7's similar application-picker function that can be bound to a mouse button so selecting an application is a mouse button away.
3. Neither the KDE nor Gnome filesystem browser allowed providing a user name/password to a CIFS server whose shares you wished to list. As a result, I could not use the CIFS browser to browse to shares on my Mac or on our Windows servers here on the office, neither of which will provide you with a share list unless you authenticate first. On the Mac, this Just Works -- the initial attempt to get the share list fails, but then you click the "Connect As" button, put in the user name and password, voila.
4. In general, integration with Apple and Windows networks was pathetic. I was reduced to doing manual mounts via the CLI mount.cifs command, which I should never have to do on a supposedly modern desktop operating system.

And finally, the ugly:

1. KDE on Ubuntu 10.04 is atrocious. There is an important directory service under KDE that sucks up gigabytes of RAM. I had to switch back to the unsatisfactory, but at least functional and efficient, Gnome UI to get work done. KDE used to be fast and clean, but it has become as bloated and dysfunctional as Windows.
2. Multi-screen support on 10.04 has taken several steps backwards. Window managers crashed when I used the standard X11 Xinerama extension. So I used the proprietary TwinView nVidia driver for my nVidia 7900 video card (a high end card from two generations back, somewhat obsolete today but I use it for Linux because its support is mature) and now multi-screen support is back... but only for the displays attached to this single video card.

My conclusion: Ubuntu 10.04 is thus far the closest that Linux has gotten to a usable desktop operating system. It is a state of the art desktop environment -- if you have been locked in a server room with pizza slid under the door for the past 15 years and still think Windows 95 is the be-all and end-all of user interface design. Both Windows 7 and MacOS 10.5/10.6 put it to shame on all measures of appearance and usability.

I can appreciate the effort that has been put into Ubuntu 10.04, and the difficulties involved in trying to turn a mass of random software from miscellaneous strangers into a coherent operating environment. But that does not change the fact that Linux on the desktop remains stuck in a time warp, fighting the battles of two decades previous in an era where time has moved on. It is especially sad that KDE today is no more usable than KDE 2.0 was ten years ago -- indeed, is *less* usable because of the bloat that has been put on top of what was a clean fast simple and well-integrated user interface. KDE has become a 1959 Cadillac, with fins the size of a aircraft tailfin and a thousand pounds of chrome weighting it down as it staggers down the highway like a bloated whale. Windows 7 suffers from some similar user interface bloat, but it has an excuse -- it's Windows. KDE has no such excuse.

So for the meantime, here's what I say: If you want a coherent, usable user environment, buy a Mac. If you want a fast server environment, use Linux. And if you want something that's neither as coherent as a Mac or as good as a server as Linux, then run Windows 7, which gives you a mediocre implementation of both worlds. As for me, I'm going to stick with my Mac on the desktop, and continue using Linux on my server. That gives me the best user environment *AND* the best server environment... but not, alas, in the same box. So it goes.

-ELG

The Windows 7 'reg' command

So I had a problem. I had a Topo 8 install on my old XP hard drive and wanted to transfer it to my new Windows 7 machine. No problem, just re-install, right? Well, that would be a problem alright, because my activation key for Delorme Netlink would not work in the new install -- Delorme links it to a single installation of Topo USA. Note that the licensing for Netlink allows me to run it on any computer that I own as long as it's just one computer at a time (i.e. I can't have it installed on more than two computers and can only use it on one computer at a time), but the actual implementation is similar to the lamentable Windows Activation in that it often disallows things that are allowed under your licensing agreement, requiring you to call in to a support center and have a database entry adjusted at the other end to allow activation.

So now let's talk about what actually happens on modern versions of Windows when you install a program. Things get placed into basically four areas:

1. Start Menu folder -- usually a folder is created here with a new Shortcut to the application plus utilities. The location of the Start Menu folder differs wildly between Windows XP and Windows 7, but it's easy to find.
2. Program Files -- usually a folder with the program and all its data is created here.
3. Windows -- Any driver bundles are plopped into the appropriate folders here, as is installer/uninstaller info.
4. Registry -- Configuration data and component registration.

Of these, the first three are easy to copy from one computer to another. But the registry entries... ah yes, now that is a problem!

The fundamental problem is that the registry is a database, and thus you can't simply use drag and drop to move entries from point A to point B, unlike with MacOS where you could just copy the appropriate directory from the old /System/Library/xxx to the new /System/Library/xxx and/or the old ~/Library/xxx to the new ~/Library/xxx to move the configuration data, or Linux where you could just copy the appropriate directory from the old /etc/xxx to the new /etc/xxx to move the configuration data. You have to use database tools, and the Windows database tools for accessing the registry are crude and primitive compared to the tools available for accessing file data. This is especially true for the 'regedit' GUI command which is utterly incapable of copying registry from place A in the registry tree to place B in the registry tree. But never fear: This is a capability that the command line 'reg' command has, and we're going to use it.

The first thing to do is to mount the old hard drive as your "D:" drive. Make sure you've added the 'Run' menu option to your Start Menu with the appropriate control panel entry (sorry, you've already seen my opinion of the Windows control panel, it's in there *somewhere* but you'll have to do like me and just dig until you find it!). Select 'Run' from your start menu, and go into 'Regedit'.

The next thing you'll need to do after that is import the HKLM hive into your registry. Click on the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE entry and select File->Load Hive. Browse over to D:\Windows\System32\config and select 'software' as the hive to import. Then give it a name, like OLD_SOFTWARE. Once you finish doing this, you'll find that OLD_SOFTWARE is now in your registry tree. You can now exit regedit, because regedit has no (zero) ability to copy subtrees from one place to another in your registry tree.

Now you'll need an administrative mode command prompt in order to operate. Now, I'm going to assume you have some basic Unix-compatible command line tools available using Cygwin or by copying files to MacOS or Linux via a network file share then executing Unix commands there, simply because there are no native Windows tools which will do the same command line parsing in as easy a manner, but it COULD be done with VBscript. It'd just be a lot more coding to make it work.

So: now that we have a command line,let's query out all the Delorme keys:

• reg query HKLM\OLD_SOFTWARE /s /f delorme >\Delorme_keys

Then copy Delorme_keys someplace where you can run Unix commands on it:

• grep "^HKEY" Delorme_keys >Delorme_keys2
• vi Delorme_keys2

Take a look at those keys, and at the original file too, to see which ones you want. In general you will not want to completely replace the contents of all keys that have some data item related to your application, you'll want the Classes and any software-specific key. So I edited Delorme_keys2 to have the keys I wanted to copy from the old install, then:

• awk ' { t=$0; sub("OLD_","",$0) ; printf("reg copy \"%s\" \"%s\" /s\n", t,$0); } ' Delorme_keys2 >DelormeRegCopy.bat

This gives me a file that has lines in it that look like this:

• reg copy "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\OLD_SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{20016EDD-4CB6-11D3-A3FA-0000C0506658}" "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{20016EDD-4CB6-11D3-A3FA-0000C0506658}" /s

The 'reg copy' command will copy both the key (and its data items) and any subkeys to the new location, assuming you provide the /s flag. Then I copy this .bat file back to the Windows 7 system, and from the Command prompt type "delormeregcopy.bat" and voila! Now my copy of the Delorme application works, Netlink works, and I can then re-install Topo 8 on top of this install to "repair" it (i.e., put the installer and driver bundles in the right place and verify that everything is registered properly) and the installation keys will still be there to keep my Netlink operational.

Note: As always, back up your registry before mucking around in it. And be *very* careful with any keys you copy in, I examined the contents of each key using regedit before I allowed it to stay in my final Delorme_keys2 file. The above is NOT the full directions for how to do this specific task, simply because I do not wish to enable software piracy, but, rather, an example of how to use the 'reg' command to copy critical registry entries from an old installation into a new installation. And the usual disclaimer "this might destroy your system!" applies.

Now: I could go off on a rant about how stupid the Windows registry is, how the tools to manipulate it are primitive and far inferior to the tools available to manipulate text files, blah blah blah, but we already all know about that. The "reg" command at least gives us some of the missing functionality that regedit doesn't have, even if it requires typing obscure commands at a command prompt. But then, "obscure" and "Windows Registry" do go together like "macaroni" and "cheese", eh?

-- EG

The Windows 7 hoopla

So is Windows 7 a Mac killer? Or is Windows 7 lipstick on a pig? The answer is "No."

Let's look at the first one first. Windows 95 in many ways introduced "the" Windows user experience. It was a clean, reasonably logical user interface that was surprisingly good from a user interface perspective considering the limitations of the underlying platform, limitations which were necessitated by the limitations of the underlying hardware and the need for DOS compatibility until Windows-specific software arrived. It was Windows 95 that I evaluated, then went to my boss and said, "This is going to be big. We need to figure out some way to make money with it." That was a few months before a customer brought Linux to our attention (and my reaction to that later -- it was not favorable, initially), but certainly I wasn't wrong when I said that to my boss.

It's been all downhill since from a user interface standpoint, with each new release of Windows having yet more useless folderol to waste resources and confuse customers but no fundamental change in the UI. Windows 7 continues that tradition, adding lipstick to the pig that has become Microsoft's overly complex user interface by re-naming some things, changing text to icons on the menu bar, and somehow managing to make the Control Panel even more complex than it already was. People who claim Windows 7 could somehow be a "Mac Killer" are being ridiculous. Changing the text on the menu bar to icons does not make it a dock, and Windows 7 is even more confusing to set up and configure than its predecessors were if you're trying to integrate it into an already-existing network. I clicked away in the control panel for quite some time before finally typing "change workgroup" into the search bar. That took me to a place where I could change the workgroup (so it matched my home and office workgroup name so my systems would appear in the network browser), but where is that located in the morass that is the Windows 7 control panel? I have absolutely no idea, I clicked into the logical place and it changed my workgroup to "WORKGROUP", which isn't what I wanted at all.

Meantime, click on the open-apple icon and select 'System Preferences'. There's two possible places where you could set the workgroup -- 'Sharing', or 'Network'. I clicked on 'Sharing' and didn't find it, so I clicked on 'Network', there's a button 'Advanced', I clicked on 'Advanced', saw the word 'WINS', and yep, there's my NetBIOS name and workgroup name. Three clicks once I got the Mac "control panel" up - Network, Advanced, WINS -- to get me where I needed to be.

So from a user interface perspective, Windows 7 definitely is lipstick on a pig. It's just a bunch of lipstick on top of the original Windows 95 user interface, and like a toddler messing with mommy's lipsticks, the results are not all that great from a usability perspective. Frankly, I prefer the original, which was fast, clean, useful. However, that's not the important changes that have been made to Windows 7. The important changes are under the hood. Windows 7, in my test, used approximately 3GB more disk space than Windows XP -- i.e., around 8GB rather than 5GB. Its memory usage for snappy performance is approximately 256MB more than Windows XP (around 756M vs. 512M) if you disable Aero by switching to a 'Basic' theme, and since Aero is just lipstick, that's no big deal. In exchange you get a more secure operating system that has built-in functionality that Windows XP lacks, such as the ability to record a DVD. I have not tested Windows 7 on a netbook yet, but I'm not seeing any reason why it wouldn't work -- even with Microsoft Office installed and various third-party Internet software (Firefox, Safari, Flash, etc.) I'm using only 14GB of disk space for my Windows 7 system, and even low-end netbooks come with 32GB SSD drives and 1GB of memory today.

So from that perspective, Windows 7 accomplishes what Microsoft wanted it to do -- it allows them to discontinue support for Windows XP because it will run pretty much everywhere that XP is currently required due to the resource usage of Vista. It also accomplishes what most IT people want -- a more secure operating system that won't require them to spend half their time cleaning up after virus outbreaks, and which allows them to standardize on *one* operating system, rather than having a mismash of various versions of Windows. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that Microsoft needs more than lipstick on a pig to clean up their user interface. They need a few iFools to lead the charge against useless UI complexity, including at least one iFool who has the status in the corporation to push back against the marketing droids and geeks who always want one...more...feature... to never be used by actual customers, but look good on a marketing flyer or looks, like, really rad, dude. I wish them luck, because after fifteen years of putting lipstick on a pig, there's almost more lipstick than pig insofar as the Windows UI is concerned.

-- EG