I recently built a working Windows XP machine because Ubuntu was just not supported well enough for work. I used my old T40 so I could preserve my T60p until I was sure I had everything right.

Today I went to move the system over. I’ve done this many times over the years both as my computer was upgraded and when migrating demos to temporary machines. I’ve done lots of moves …. T20 -> T40, T40 -> T42, T42p -> T41, X60 -> T60p and even did an X60/T60p swappable drive once. So, I thought the T40 -> T60p would be just as quick as all the rest. ANGK!

I partitioned the new hard drive just like the old one – three partitions: 256MB, 32GB, ‘remainder’. I installed my SystemRescueCD files to the HDD and installed GRUB as well. Just for the record (since I’ve managed to loose my notes three times now), here are the instructions for installing GRUB to the 256mb partition along with SystemRescueCD …

1. boot from SystemRescueCD
2. create first partition on HDD is 256MB (yes, that little). It will be called “sda1″
3. format as ext2
4. copy SystemRescueCD files and “boot” directory to “sda1″ (already has my menu.lst customized)
5. start GRUB from the SystemRescueCD command prompt
6. GRUB> root (hd0,0)
7. GRUB> setup (hd0) -or- setup (hd0,0) hd0
8. GRUB> quit

So far, so good. I was on a roll. I then launched PARTIMAGE and restored the backup of the T40 to the 32GB partition.

I rebooted, saw the boot loader, the Windows splash screen and the BSOD …. hmmm. that’s odd. I’ve never had that happen before. …

A few more attempts hoping it was just a fluke and then it was off to Google for help. After about 30 minutes, I had my answer. the T60 has a SATA drive and WindowsXP is so “old school” (first released in 2001) it has not default drivers for it. Lots of attempts to get the drivers over and nothing worked. I went off and did other stuff. I cam back and Googled more and tried more stuff. I went off again …

I finally found out about nLite and created a Windows XP install disk with the SATA drivers. I figured I could just use the Recovery Console and add the missing driver and I’d be set. Well, I could not boot my Windows XP install CD and I could get to the Recovery Console and look around my restored drive but I could not find a way to actually install the missing driver. Turns out you can’t add a missing driver even if you have the driver and the Recovery Console lets you see your drive.

The magic (slow painful magic) came from an article discussing how to recover form replacing your PC’s system board. The writer clearly states; “do not use the option for “repair a Windows XP installation using the Recovery Console”. Instead, start the Windows install and then select “repair” once it has found your existing installation. I can only say “that’s far from intuitive!”

I had six or seven nasty looking “missing or corrupted” type pop-ups. I just clicked “OK”. I figured at this point, I’d been walking on thin ice for so long, I might as well dance the jig.

It took an hour for Windows to do what it thought it needed to do and I on the first reboot I saw that pretty blue screen again. It seems Windows never got around to actually installing the missing SATA driver !

… Oy vey !

Well, in a week’s time, I will no longer use Ubuntu for my work laptop. I really like the clean efficient experience I get from Ubuntu but my corporate support and the applications I need for work just don’t give Linux the same credence that comes to Windows XP. The downfall came in three parts:

• I need good blackberry support (both sync’ing and use as a tethered modem)

• while it is theoretically possible to use a Blackberry with Ubuntu, it is difficult at best and some things like a full resync and updating certificates is a Windows only proposition. The same is true for using the Blackberry as a modem (unless you are a *nix God).

• I need my documents to look perfect when I share them with colleagues and executives

• no matter how you cut it, an OpenOffice document is not 100% the same as a Microsoft Office document and the same goes in reverse. It is this last bit that was one of the fatal nails. I could not reliably round trip a document or presentation with coworkers and worse, if the presentation went up to an executive, odds were nearly 100% something would look wrong.

• I need my heavy use apps to work and be supported by corporate IT

• the two most used applications in my office are Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime. They both are available on Linux but neither is 100% as functional as on Windows. I realize that Ubuntu is not yet supported by the Lotus products but that just means every issue is answered by “sorry”. And I know some of these exist on Windows but I can’t do much about that until I switch back. I have lived with so many PITAs that shouldn’t exist – and this is not just “the first Linux release”, but after subsequent releases.

The good news is that some of my favorite things will travel back with me. Tools like GIMP for graphics arts work; Thunderbird as my blogging client; SystemRescueCD (installed on the HDD or course) as my full image backup strategy; and while I can’t take my very clean TAR-GZ daily backup solution back to Windows, I will take the strategy and implement it with DataSafe Backup or Comodo Backup.

There will be some things I will miss. But it’s all about productivity and Windows for my corporate life has provien too difficult to rebuff. Fortunately, Ubuntu remains on my personal laptop. <yippie>

I nuked my Ubuntu Linux work laptop a couple of weeks ago – on purpose. The ATI video was unpredictable and my Thinkpad T60p would not sleep or hibernate (both known issues due to the ATI chipset). I took a bit of extra time before completely building it back up. I didn’t want to mess it up like before.

• I did not install the ATI video driver
• I did not attempt to get Compiz Fusion working
• I installed and later removed xcompmgr (initially to get AWN working)
• I did configure, but later disabled, Avant Windows Navigator
• I did ‘theme’ Ubuntu to look a bit like OS X (I’ve gotten comfortable with the look and having my window controls on the left)

I am left with a 24 pixel panel at the top and bottom of my screen. The one at the bottom is for my “open windows” but I seldom use it so it will be the next thing to go. The one at the top has icons for the most used apps, the default desktop switcher, and my status icons. With this setup, I have all nearly all of my screen real estate for work and I have nearly all the same function as my “cool desktop”.

I miss the 3D effects but I have not really given up much in the way of functionality. What I have gained is a faster startup time, hibernate and sleep functions, more available memory, and a few less distractions. Most of all, the machine is more stable and less vulnerable to system updates that trash the video.

I’ve been looking for a good “screen recording” solution for Ubuntu. When I was a windows guy, I used Camtasia 5. It worked really well. For a while they were even giving away version 3 but that seems to have gone away. Still, if you use Windows, you can make 30 days worth of screen videos with the latest trial version.

Stephen over at techosystems listed “recordMyDesktop” in one of his recent “links posts“. I’ve tried most of the other options for recording my screen while running through a demo. Most had serious problems with the 1400×1050 screen on my Thinkpad T60p. recordMyDesktop actually handles it pretty well.

The program is a command-line tool and there are a couple of GUI front-ends to it. I didn’t find the GUIs so I just did a little trial and error and used the command line interface. It turns out it is very easy so I just made a few BASH scripts and will likely never install a GUI. Here are two of my command lines – the first is “full screen” and the second is an example of a portion of the screen.

recordmydesktop –no-sound -o ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg
- or -
recordmydesktop -x 2 -y 51 -width 1000 -height 698 –no-sound -o ~/Videos/screen-recording

If you want to record a single application window, you can just type “xwininfo” in a command window and then click on the window you want to record. It will spit back the coordinates of the upper left corner and the window’s width and height. Then you just plug those into the command line above.

Recording will start as soon as you hit “ENTER” after the recordmydesktop command. You finish recording by returning to the command window and hitting “CTRL-C”. It’s not elegant but is simple enough. Again, the GUI improves the user experience.

The recording is in ogg format – an open source video container format that is very very efficient. Unfortunately, it is not very common outside the Linux world. Fortunately there is ffmpeg – a very good tool for converting video and audio files from one format to another. Here again, I have a couple simple BASH script to run the command line tool – the first converts the video to an AVI file with xvid coding and the second does the same but scales down the video and the third converts to FLASH video which works with YouTube.

ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg -vcodec xvid -b 100k ~/Videos/screen-recording.avi
- or -
ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg -s 700×525 -vcodec xvid -b 100k ~/Videos/screen-recording.avi
- or -
ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg -vcodec flv -b 100k ~/Videos/screen-recording.flv

So, with two command line tools and a couple of BASH scripts, I now have a reasonable solution for creating video recording of demos *and* given some recent disasters I’ve seen at computer conferences where networking was down, having a video recording of the demo as backup is paramount !

My Thinkpad T60p has been running Ubuntu for about 4 months and I’ve enjoyed [almost] every moment. I agree it is not perfect – suspend / hibernate still not supported – but with a multi-desktop GUI, a very productive dock (Avant Window Manager), remote terminals (VNC and Remote Desktop), business tools, research tools, etc. I’ve made very good use of the machine.

Recently, I’ve been wanting suspend and hibernate to work and recently there has been a bunch of internet traffic about new ATI drivers – specifically the new Catalyst 7.12 driver. I followed the easy instructions and rebooted to be witness to a video disaster – the video rendering of Comiz and VLC were very slow.. I panicked but had enough still functioning to try the alternate install process. That was worse – now I had a square block under the cursor that would appear more often than not and remain until some other action refreshed the screen.

I Googled for a solution and started editing the xorg.conf. That was a *big* mistake. On the next re-boot, I ended up with a whopping 800×600 display and not much else. In a panic, I Googled some more and got instructions for unistalling my mess. Yet another big mistake as I dug the hole even deeper. When I finished uninstalling what the instructions indicated, and rebooted, I had lost my network.

The saga went on for a couple more hours. I finally got networking back. Then I looked for my old instructions and found some that were good enough.

The consisted of …

• install the ATI 8.42.3 driver
• check the install with “fglrxinfo” to see the following:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5200
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6473 (8.37.6)

• check your xorg.conf against the one for the “good enough” link

This whole ordeal would have been easier if I had not been traveling as I could simply restore my system form the NAS. All the backups in the world can’t help when they’re not accessible. I guess my next trick should be cloud storage !

I’ve become one of those recent “converts” – not to one of the coveted MacBooks but to using Linux on my personal and work laptops. I will admit, the Mac is better for a couple of reasons which mostly boil down to “its easer to develop to a small set of variables than to a large set”. What this means is that Mac OS-X has a very controlled set of hardware to run on and the software has very few permutations. Imagine how complex it would be for the new iChat to work across 3 different CPU vendors, 5 flavors of each; a dozen or more video cards; ditto for network cards; ditto for sound cards – you get the picture.

I am quite amazed at how quickly the Linux community takes the best of Mac OS-X and implements it for multiple flavors of the operating system and does its best to tackle the 25,920 possible combinations (12 x 12 x 12 x 5 x 3) <grin>.

They may not get it right the first time and in some cases they may never get it right (but that is usually because the target audience is so small). But the infinite monkeys theory is alive in well in the world of open source and these moneys are smart !

The Mac OS-X showed the world the convenience and fun of the “dock” and 3-D desktops, and “cover flow” and “fan out” and “time machine”. the Linux community was quick to create Avant-Window-Manager, compiz-fusion, and TimeVault.

I still fight with my Linux machines nearly every day – I still can’t get my Thinkpad to suspend and the Blackberry tether over USB as a modem – even with hours and hours of reading and experimenting. I trust they will work one day. Still, I like my Linux laptop. Which what I’ve learned, I am sure I could recreate my new work environments on Windows by why bother – pretty soon, I will have found solutions for my regular necessities (like a decent replacement for “MS Project”). I don’t miss the other office suite programs. My person mail is handled nicely by Thunderbird – especially since Google added IMAP for Gmail – and for work, I can live with the misbehaving nature of Lotus Notes 8 on Linux – it is their first release so they deserve some slack.

I still keep my “Linux lists” such as “things you can’t do on Linux”, “things only a Linux god can do”, “things that should be easy but are not”, … you get the idea.

Linux takes a line from Mary_Schmich’s column published in the Chicago Tribune – “Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements” – in other words, enjoy the results of your tweaking, our python scripts, your bash, your numerous cuts-n-pastes from blogs and forums. Backup your system often. Revert when you’ve made a mess. Assemble the good parts and “show them your Linux” !