Hi guys,

4 days ago, I’ve posted about the pain of selecting the right OS. I would love to write: “I’ve found it! XYZ is the perfect match for me!”, but this does not happen (yet). And believe me: I don’t make it easy for myself.

I leaned back for an hour or so and thought about the local infrastructure here. Thinking about 3 screaming servers in the basement, a screaming loud Linksys GBit 19″ switch and a powerful PC at the attic. Hmm…

To be honest, after thinking for a time, I ask myself for what I will need it, I thought about energy costs and virtualization aspects of the new Q9650 CPU in my workstation. The servers are running at a very low CPU and RAM usage (sure, Linux uses around 100% of the RAM, but just because it’s there). Hmm… 2 wasting servers and an IPCop. Do you get what I was thinking about? Right! The workstation could handle some VMs while running, this would save me around 160 Watts. Calculate this over a month, a year – win/win – without loosing the comfort of different servers.

Good point – in my mind and the first step into the right direction. (Some of you may think: What!? He has so great hardware and think about not using it?! – Yep! But good to have a backup, right?).

Turning to the workstation, here’s what I did in the last few days on my PC.

First of all, I’ve removed the RAID from my server HADRON and put it back to the PC. Initially I’d bought the RAID for the workstation. I wanted to run Vista, having 2 graphic cards in the PC aswell. A PC that could be created by Stefan Didak

The truth is, I have a different scope of (private) work I’m doing here at home. Work is done on a single ThinkPad using Windows XP.

But back to the last 4 days. Now, that I’ve set up Windows Vista on the 6TB RAID, which is nice fast and secure, I’m trying to get back to Windows day by day. It’s pretty hard, if you’ve used OS X for the last few years mainly for private work. I don’t count the business stuff, because I work with special tools there and I know how to handle it, so XP works for me there.

Over the weekend, I’ve done some work on a PHP/MySQL web-app, I’m currently writing. Guess what I’ve used for this. You got it: My MacBook. Not that I couldn’t use Intype in Windows instead of TextMate on OS X and WinSCP on Windows instead of Transmit on OS X… Well, on one hand, I’ve worked for hours on Sunday in the bed. The last day of the 1 week vacation and we watched some TV series while I was working on the web-app. Right now, I’m writing this post on my MacBook, which lies in front of my PC keyboard and in front of the 2 displays.

Hmm…

Damn – if I would find a way to use the RAIDset as bootable volume for a Hackintosh based system, I think I would vote for this. But I think that’s not possible

Turning to the other site: before I’ve installed the RAIDset, I tried installing Debian, getting the graphic card to work was a challenge, but there’s Google, so I found a nice tutorial or call it HowTo. When I got this to work and also had the WindowMaker running in German instead of US, I wanted to play a video at the freshly installed VLC. No sound. Oh dear! Installing and configuring for hours and I have no sound. Of course – I had installed it from scratch and not “Desktop” in the installation setup – me fool.

To make long things short: I’d wasted 5h’s and was a little bit frustrated, so I’d inserted the Ubuntu 9.04 64bit CD that was laying on my desk and installed this instead. Hmm.. nice, but… even with the running sound, I found some bugs usung Xinerama and 2 diplays (the cursor stays at the left screen when I moved it to the left one for example, and does not fade away). I played around with Ubuntu for some more minutes or maybe 2 hours. It simply does not fit to me – as a desktop. It doesn’t worked for me really in the past and it will not work for me in the future.

Isn’t this great? I’ve removed Linux from my “possible desktop”-list.

Now there are just two systems left:
- Mac OS X as a Hackintosh installation
- Windows Vista 64bit

Not easy to choose, I see pros in both parts, but I really don’t want to have a Dual-Setup. Why not? Well, I would more switch from System to System than doing something productive. Currently, I do a enough unproductive

That’s the current status. Can’t await your comments

Ciao
Dennis

[Update]
Hi, just found this interesting YouTube video from Chris Pirillo I would like to show you, so I grabbed it and… well – here it is Have fun!

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hi guys,

while crossing through different systems (if you click a bit through my blog, you get an idea ), I thought it was a nice idea to put my mostly used software together for each area and OS in a table with links to the project sites.

Here we go…

Comment: Regarding Office @ Linux/UNIX: I never used a spreadsheet-tool on Linux/UNIX yet, but for word-processing, I’m very satisfied with Abiword.

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hey guys,

this is a post about my thoughts about different Operating Systems and the issue that I have while trying to select MY OS for myself.

Back in the 80ies when I grow up, I had my Schneider CPC464 with a funny green CRT. I learned a bit about Basic on this little machine and of course, also played cool games like Boulder Dash those days.

After 2 years, I got a Commodore C64 for christmas with a fancy color display. I couldn’t believe it! Computers where monochrome for me those days. My Dad had a IBM-XT PC and I remember that I loved to see how AutoCAD built the Columbia. Simply loading and displaying it took about one hour. Funny days. Of course, my Dad also had a monochrome screen, which was enough for dBase, Text4 and a bit of AutoCAD.

Around 3 years later, I wanted more power (oh dear, that is the point in my life where it all begun), so I sold my C64 and took some money that I got from my birthday and had to decide: get an Amiga 500 to play with or buy this crappy, but geeky 80286-AT with 8MHz and whopping 2MB of RAM and a fany 20MB MFM harddisk. The Amiga could be connected to a TV, what means color. The PC had a orange (Bernstein) color CRT. Honestly, I don’t know why, but I had the feeling, that the PC is the better choice. Ha! I remember that the 3.5″ floppy didn’t worked with 1.44MB diskettes and my Dad and I didn’t understand why. A few years later someone told me, that some 286/AT PCs where not able to allocate more than “DD” (720KByte) to the BUS, so I stuck with the DD diskettes, what was not a big issue. I installed DOS 5.0 on it and had fun playing around with QBasic which was delivered with the OS. Later, I started to use Windows 3.0 on it. Crappy software, but it worked. I had more fun on the console.

The next big thing was an upgrade to the 80386-DX/33 that a friend of my parents sold me. I got 4MB of RAM for it and took the ISA MFM cards from the previous PC with me. For christmas I got an upgrade to 8MB of RAM. Damn expensive! The system of the choice was meanwhile MS-DOS 6.2 and still Windows 3.11, which I rarely used. It was so much more fun to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the last KByte/s of the memory below 640KByte/s. This was needed to play a lot games. It was before strange tools like MemMaker or Quemm386

With upgrading to my 80486-DX/33, I started to use Windows more and more. When I upgraded the CPU and kicked out the Intel CPU and installed my first CPU on my own (a AMD-468/DX4/100), Windows 95 came out and I bought it. It was really painful to spend 200 DM on this, even if it was “just” an upgrade from my previous Win 3.11).

*STOP*

This was the point where I should look around and seek out for other systems. Linux was already born those days, but at those times, just a handfull people in my city had access to data networks via modem and mailboxes. I had none and all friends just knew Windows and heared of Mac’s.

*GOING ON WITH THE STORY*

The AMD CPU was sooo cool and I was very proud of it, my friends where amazed by the speed of Command and Conquer on my computer. Oh yeah – I had a 14″ color CRT that time.

From 1995, everything went faster. Much much faster. While I was happy with my 386 and 486 for a couple of years, I didn’t had the AMD CPU for a long time, because I spend ALL of the money that I had collected for a Pentium 100MHz CPU. WOW! Whopping fast and amazing CPU. Of course, I had to buy a new mainboard for this.

I remember that I went through a AMD K6-200MHz and a Intel Celeron 300A which was clocked at 450MHz. This was the most reliable machine I ever had. It worked until 2 years ago! Pretty cool, ha?

Windows 95 was replaced by Windows 98 SE and games became heavier. A nVidia RIVA-TNT AGP card with 16MByte or RAM was the fastet card in the clique. A friend and I bought the same system in the same store, 100% the same 128MB RAM. Wohoo! But you know what? I want make the thing a bit shorter.

In my education I worked a lot on Apple Macintosh systems. G3/266MHz Performa series and later on, on G4 Dual Core 400MHz machines. At home I worked on Windows 2000. I had a job at a company in Düsseldorf for 1/2 year until I wanted to start my studies at the University of Dortmund (IT). While moving to the new apartment, I a killed building savings contract. Wow! So much money! I spend about 2500 DM on my very first own Mac. An iBook G3 with 12.1″. But I was not really satisfied with the iBook and sold it a few months later. I had my PC all the time to do 3D graphics with my bougth Student version of Maxon’s Cinema 4D, so I worked on this a lot. At the end of the year (2001), I wanted a Mac again, but not a mobile one, so I collected money and bought a QuickSilver G4/733MHz Apple PowerMac and I was satisfied – for a few months. I went back to Moers, because the education at the University was not the right thing for me and started working for Medion. A PC manufactor here in Germany who sells the PCs at the ALDI stores, maybe you’ve heared of them. So – there I was, with a brandnew job at the callcenter, some experience in the mind of how to use the Windows XP, that was the state of art for a few months now, but without the chance of testing anything at home, because the PPC just allowed me to run Mac OS X . No free selection like today – Windows on Macs? Yes, there where some expensive and superslow tools available. So I sold the Mac and the iBook that I got meanwhile (some people do funny things, ha?) and got a Pentium 4 / 2GHz – equipped with Windows XP. I was not really satisfied in the beginning with Windows XP and because of that, I also played around a lot with Linux. I ran RedHat 8, 9 and Fedore Core 2. Debian was nice, but I used that more on the SparcStations that I got for a few bucks by eBay. I had my new apartment and so I collected computers. Yeah, call me a nerd, a geek – I am I had different Suns, 2 SGIs (Indigo & O2) and a lot of different PCs over the years. Also Macs where a “I want to have” products, just to count a few: G5 (2x), iBooks, PowerBooks and yes, also Mac Pro as you can read here.

Today, I’m running a MacBook Unibody 13″ and I’m very satisfied with it. I sold the MacPro a few months ago and since that, I’m hunting for a system for me which really satisfies me. Maybe you’ve seen that I ran Hackintosh for a while. It was more or less great. Because the system was simply not made for this hardware, I run into hardware issues and crazy constructions to fix them again and again. In the end, I finally gave up. OS X is great – on Macs. I must admit, that I spend a lot time on this and it was maybe a waste of time.

The issue that I ran into is, that I’m not satisfied with ANY OS nowadays. Let me give you a brief overview on 5 systems that I’d used in the past.

MAC OS X
I love it – on my MacBook. It’s perfect if you do exactly what you should do. Do presentations in Keynote, write things in Pages, browse using Safari or maybe also Firefox (since 3.x it’s really nice on OS X, too). If I want to collect my photos, I use iPhoto. I never understood Aperture, but that is a really different thing.

OS X is great if you simply want to do your stuff. But I am a person that wants more. Having my Mac Pro under the desk, I wanted a RAID5 where I could boot from. Sure, there’s a card for around 800 US$ + harddrives + a horrible expensive “Bootcamp”-cable. No way! Too expensive. One of the reasons why I sold it – I was simply pissed, even if it was an awesome computer! (And yeah, maybe it was a fault to sell it).

What annoys me most on OS X is described in an older post of me.

But isn’t it funny? I spend a lot money on this PC I type on now, bought 6 harddiscs, an expensive hardware-RAID-controller by Areca and two graphic cards, new mainboard, CPU, a lot of RAM and a handful deluxe Noktua fans for this beast – and what did I do after some days of disappointment with Vista? Installing OS X. Bam! Here we are now.

Currently, I’m installing different systems again and again with the hope to find a fitting one for me.

The issue is, that I was more or less satisfied with OS X. Hackintosh runs more or less stable, but not good enough for a complete and main system (in my eyes) – so OS X was out. Oh! How often did I said that? :/ – very often – and a day later, the Hackintosh was installed again.

So, what annoys me on Vista?

VISTA
Vista, I get sick when I see Aero. What a clumbsy design is that. It looks awful and I hate it from the deepest of my sould . Everything is somewhere else and the PC reacts too often for my taste and tells me what to do. It’s slow even on this beast of a computer. Sure, here I have my tools like Photoshop, MS Office and Intype which is a great replacement for TextMate on Windows, but it feels wrong. Today, I’ve installed it again and what should I say? I didn’t get the configuration done before I had these “this is not your system”-feeling. I was satisfied with XP in the end. I hate Lune, too. Royal Blue theme was pretty cool and I also used to work with the Classic mode. Not beautyful, but worked for me. In Vista, sure – I can turn of Aero and also join the Classic Mode, but c’mon – it’s 2009 and I still should use a “theme” from 1995?! No.

LINUX
Well, lovely, free and great Linux. I love Linux – on my servers. My webserver here is running for nearly 2 years now without any issues, based on Ubuntu server 6.06.2. Very nice! But on my desk… As mentioned before, I had Fedora Core 2 running for a while (like 6 months). I had the time to really get into. I understood how and WHY to have to mount my cameras card by hand. Even my scanner worked (the same which don’t work today on Vista nor OS X ). I was solo that time. Today, I’ve a wife, I’ve a house and a job that don’t know shift ends, so I have less time.

Linux is in my mind a system with future. Also on the desktop! Not for me – yet, but when I see movies like StartUp (AntiTrust), which is my absolute favourite movie, I fell in love with the design of Synapse (which is GNome v1). It looks so cool, clean and maybe geek enough for my desires . 2-3 years ago, I used Ubuntu a lot, but it had some issues with my hardware and the fact, that it don’t run Photoshop (please, don’t comment here that I should use Gimp instead, I’m using Photoshop since 1996 and I don’t feel like I should switch to Gimp), makes it worse for me.

Today, there’s a MacBook laying here on my desk (currently sleeping ) so there’s all I need to work on, right? But I bought this PC that is now under my desk. The RAID5 is now in the server in the rack in the basement of our house, but the PC remains here. 2x 22″ displays sitting on this desktop (I’ve just added a 2nd desk to my part of the desk to seperate work & private a bit – I really need to make some current photos and share with you guys), which was simply too expensive to let it stay under the desk and get dusty. Selling it also on eBay? No. Not really.

UNIX
I also used FreeBSD at the beginning of this year (remember?) to start into ZFS and Software RAID. I removed it when I got my hardware RAID card. I like FreeBSD; it’s nice, very fast but has one painpoint: Hardware compatibity. Some goes for OpenSolaris and Solaris itself. I’ve tried all of them and I think they are great for servers, but for my desktop? Hmm…

RESUMÉ
What’s the resumé of this pretty long post? I don’t know. That’s the reason why I type it. I would love to write: Hey, I installed Debian on my Desktop from scratch and I’m super happy with it, but that’s not the truth.

OS X is the thing for the MacBook – fine, but not for this PC (I’m happy to leave those days behind me, because when you think everything should work find and you get a Kernel Panic suddenly on the screen showing you the middlefinger – you have to keep cool to not freak out because of all the time and work you’ve invested in this ungrateful shitty machine!!!).

Windows is currently installed. I’m typing this on Firefox in Vista while Trillian Astra Beta runs the same time. Aero is set up and I hate it So, I think that’s not the way I want to go.

Linux is the system I would love to use, but I want it sexy. The current Ubuntu comes with a funky and very very good antialiasing, but I’ve not idea how to get this into Debian. Fedora 11 download (DVD/ISO) has just finished. Ubuntu 64bit CD also lays on the desk, ready for a boot from the LiveCD.

I would love to use a system like Milo from StartUp and know what to do. Oh! Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not an expert, but I feel familiar in the console and know what I do there. Ok – the theme is not available anywhere – believe me, I’ve spend a lot time on searching for it.

While writing the last chapter here, I thought about really risking it and installing Debian again. The hardware is not that big problem anymore. Everything got much much easier compared to my Fedora Core 2 days. Even my color laser printer should work out of the box now. But there’s also a bit a afraidness to really use it. You could say, that I was tainted by OS X. Everything looks so nice and friendly in OS X, when I check Linux screenshots I often thing “OMG! How could they…??” and click the screenshot away. I’m a learned Mediadesigner and I love digital art, that’s why I possibly feel so good on OS X – until I want to change something deep inside the OS. That’s why I like Linux, doing things can be easy, but can also be damn complicated. But let me tell you one thing, even Windows can be hellish complicated. Ever tried to install an Exchange server on a bland Windows Standard x64 Server? Much fun, dude!

I’m seeking out for a good conclusion to come to an end of this story/report, but I can’t find one.

So – this could be more a dialog than posts before. Please, leave some comments if you want to. Maybe someone else who reads this feeld the pain of selecting the right OS and is unsatisfied (or was – what could be most helpful ) with all available systems.

Have a nice night!

Ciao
Dennis

EDIT
Attached, 3 screenshots from the motion picture “AntiTrust” (StartUp).

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hey guys,

a few weeks ago, I sold my Mac Pro. The reason was quiet simple: It was really oversized for my needs and having it here felt like a waste of money. The idea was to build a nice PC, which is also powerfull but not that oversized with a large storage based on an Areca RAID. When the Mac Pro was sold, I went out out and bought 3 more 1TB HDDs, the Areca RAID Controller, a new mainboard, a new graphics card, a bunch of luxury Noctua fans (incl. CPU cooler) and a Quad Core Q9650 Intel CPU. I spend a lot of money for this. I always had a licence of Vista, so I didn’t had to buy this.

Well, what’s the result of this plan? I fighted with Vista. No – not really, it’s nice and smooth, the Aero optics sucks in my mind, but the new Office 2007 is really nice and was on the list to buy it after evaluating it. But, I just played and solved and built other stuff in and out and honestly, I was not really satisfied with the Windows machine. I thought I could go on with this.

In the last 3 weeks I was thinking about getting a new notebook for my personal needs. Sure, I got a ThinkPad T61 from Cisco for my work and nothing really tells me not to use it to surf on the terrace in the garden, but it still feels wrong and I’m not really sure if I am allowed to do this by the terms of use by the Cisco IT. The challenge was to find a nice notebook that fits my needs. I want a nice one, not a bad looking monster with 15.4″ or more of display width. Even with an eye on the new Unibody MacBooks I made my decision on Tuesday for a Lenovo ThinkPad R61 with 4GB RAM for a very nice price of around about 700 Euro. The R61 is the much heavier version, but 14.1″, of the T61. TrackPoint is cool, but the display is just a regular one with around 170-200cd/m2 what is not really food for outdoor usage.

Yesterday I called CyberPort and canceled the order. For my luck, they hadn’t have it on stock, so it was no problem. I then called a local Mac store in Duisburg which is the neighbour city of my home town and asked if they have a MacBook (smallest version with 2GHz) on stock. Yes. One last was available. They reserved it for me until 8pm, when the store would close. Right after work, my wife and I went to this store and for my surprise I get 100 Euro price-off if I bring in ANY old computer in the next days. I think it’s a great deal to pick up a new MacBook for 1099 Euro, I just have to bring my real old G3 b/w to them on Saturday

What is the resumé of this story? Well, the first thing is, that I’m absolutely amazed by this nice and very robust MacBook. The keyboard is fantastic (I’m currently typing this article on it) and I get familiar with the large touchpad. Ok – the click thing is a bit new for me, but the gestures with 2 to 4 fingers is pretty cool and handy. Also the display is very nice. It’s LED powered and so I could better use it outdoor if I want to. Yes, the display is glossy and also I had concerns regarding this, but since we’ve got our new Panasonic plasma in December last year which also has a glossy screen, I’m very satisfied with glossy displays. I admit, the MacBook will not become my main computer. I would add my older Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 board and the new CPU; maybe the old Core 2 Duo CPU to this and install my preferred system on it, which is thanks to different forums not a problem (and pretty legal in Germany). I don’t say more, because I think you know what I’m talking about .

But wait a moment, what will I do with the 6TB RAID? Will this work in the old mainboard? No. Honestly, not. But that’s not a thing that doesn’t let me sleep as I still have my AMD64 machine and a nice 19″ 4U case on stock to built a Linux or FreeBSD based server again and put it into the 19″ rack in the basement. I’m very happy that the Areca RAID is so compatible and allows me to use the large volumes (4.6TB available for data , 200GB for system) also with Linux or FreeBSD systems and just with Windows. But this is a challenge that is planned for the weekend. Now I’m just happy to have a system (the MacBook) which simply works.

Now, you could place a comment and call me a fool to be so unsure what I want and in parts, you would be right. What did I told a friend yesterday evening on chat? Apple has buggered me with creating an OS that is so nice that you still want to use it, even if it’s sometimes a living behind fences

I wish you all a nice day!

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hi guys,

a few weeks ago I wrote (a bit in anger, I admit) about my concerns with the 3.0.6 Firefox on both Systems, Windows and Mac. Meanwhile, the current version has been grown to the version 3.0.8 and I must revert my opinion about my bad comments on it. I’m using it forth and it looks like Mozilla has fixed those issues.

I’d no crashes for a long time (except 1 today which was initiated by one of our tools at work (my colleagues know what I mean ).

It’s not that I just shout about anything, I also welcome fixes

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

G’morning guys,

do you know the feeling when a system is so rock solid that you having nothing to complain about?

Well, me not – yet. But it seems, that FreeBSD is such a system. Let me explain what happend.

The installed OS (Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6) on my Client/Workstation is basicly installed since August last year. Yep! I moved it using Carbon Copy Cloner over 3 harddisks so far, because I was in need of the disk space for the backup for the server preparation (to name it: all 3x 1TB disks were in use and no more available for backups). So – this morning something strange happend. I’m gonna use a Samba/SMB/CIFS currently for the main transfer of files and the videostuff between the Mac and the FreeBSD server. I was just in Photoshop to save a the photo of the X41 keyboard that I used for my this mornings update on the last post. Suddenly it told me that it can’t save. Error. Booom. I thought “Damn – what’s this?”, opened up a terminal and connected to the server using the GBit Subnet IP. Works fine, a Samba restart didn’t helped me out. I was about to think about a server reboot, but wait. Since 2 days, my QuickSilver didn’t index as regular, typing program names delivers anything else, but not what I was looking for. Finally, I shut the Mac down, give a few seconds to rest and launched it up. To explain: I’m using the energy save mode and rarly really shut down the Mac. So the uptime was about 2 weeks or so and the RAM was filled up to 10GB because of different very big tools for videocut.

Booting it up again didn’t showed me my Storage Samba icon. Oh dear! It’s a server problem. But, hold on – pressing Alt+K to connect to the server and voilá – it works. Normally it should mount itself on the systems start, but I think that I’ve used the wrong account credentials to login when I created this shortcut.

Icon back, everything fine and works.

Resumé: The meanwhile 5 days running server (yes 24/7), works still perfect. I think I should find a job for him, like doing SETI@home or Folding@home or Climate Prediction jobs using BOINC.

Desired icon of luck

In the last few days, I really thought about switching to OpenSolaris on the server because of the bit better implemenation of ZFS into the system, but – it’s rock solid, so why should I do if everything works fine? FreeBSD seems really to be one of those (todays rare) “Fire & Forgot” systems.

Just Pros for this OS? Hmmnaaaa…. not all is fine. It’s a server OS in my mind. I used to install it on my X41 as mentioned in my last post, it’s fine and after fiddling around for a few hours and the great help of some guys from the #bsdgroup.de channel on irc.freenode.org, the WiFi also worked flawless, but what’s this? pkg_add and using the ports just give me Firefox 2.0? Yes – Firefox is even on my Mac not the nice and stable sweet part of software that I know well from the past (it really tends to crash and I’m just using AdBlock Plus, Filter Updater, Foxmarks and Flash as plugins).

While I’m waiting for the recovery CDs to arrive, I think I will play with other systems, I’ve laying around here. Cryptic stuff like QNX or so Nothing to work with, but interessting to play with, isn’t it?

For your amusement, here’s, to return to the server site of this post, a few videos I found on YouTube about ZFS. I really enjoyed them and they finally helped me to make the decision to use ZFS and RAIDz1 for my data.

Have fun!

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hi,

is it me? I don’t think so. I’m using Firefox in the current version on my Mac and on Windows on my work notebook. On both systems, in the last version, it tends to crash very often, not to mention those annoying Flash error messages that I get on the Mac version.

Maybe it’s one of my plugins, but I don’t believe that, because I’m using them for a long time now:

- Foxmarks (Mac/Win)
- AdBlock Plus (Mac/Win)
- AdBlock Filter.G Updater (Mac/Win)
- FoxClocks (Win)
- FireBug (Win)
- FirePHP (Win)

I’ve no idea what to do to solve this. I’ve already set up Firefox new on both machines with bad results. Especially plaing Flash Videos seems to affect it and let it crash, the same goes for the Java of WebEx.

Suggestions and ideas how to solve this are welcome as well as your own experiences with the recent (3.0.6) version.

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Good morning,

on saturday I opened up my private ThinkPad T41. I was running Win XP and Ubuntu site by site and I was in need to test something on Windows, so I rebooted the notebook and selected “Windows XP” from the GRUB menu.

When Windows opened it asked me (for my surprise) to activate it. I was wondering, because it was installed for a few months and still activated. Ok – well, I was in need to get some data from the NTFS partition and so I accepted the way to activate (again). The next thing I saw was a message, that this version was already activated. I thought “fine” and hit the OK button. Not OK! It logged my out immediatley. I tried it a few times, but no way to get into. Booting to the secured mode was possible, so I could grab my files on a USB stick. Trying to activate my Windows again with a tool won’t work, so I had to kick it from the disk. Damn

I then thought that it’s a good point to try Vista on my ThinkPad. The installation took a real long time and after a lot updates (I had installed it from a SP1 disc), it worked nice, except the graphic card. I’ve a Radeon Mobility 7500 inside this ThinkPad. Lenovo says on their website: “Installed within the operating system”. Hmm nice.. but this OS tells me that it is a standard vga card. After crawling through the web I found a hint to use the Radeon Mobility 9000 driver which really comes with the Vista. Voilá works. Please be warned, that it will NOT allow you to use Aero. The points from the Vista test will be around 1,0 But it should extremly reduce the usage of your CPU and thanks to this, your ThinkPad will/should stay a bit cooler.

I played around with the system, but (of course) it seems like Windows Vista is kinda slow on this 1.6GHz Pentium-M CPU and with poor 1Gig of RAM, so after playing for a while and trying to get it fully working (also with the Lenovo System Update Tool), I kicked it also from my harddisc and installed Windows XP last night. This morning I started to configure my Windows XP. Of course I HAVE TO call Microsoft to activate my very own copy of Windows XP *sigh*. I can’t remember when the online activation worked the last time. That is a very odd and annoying think Microsoft!

So, that’s my little story about the ThinkPad T41 and a hint how to install the graphics card if you really want to have a real slow OS on this very nice notebook. I for myself will go back to my Windows XP / Ubuntu 8.10 combination.

Oh – if you wonder that I didn’t have an image/snapshot. I have, but that is possibly the evil thing that results me in not being able to login.

Have a nice day!

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hello,

well – so that’s the first entry I type from my little ThinkPad T41 and I’ve the feeling, that it will be not the last one.

On friday I had the idea to put all the small and little disks laying around here into the 4U rack case which lies around unused and put this all together into the 22U rack in the basement to have a solid place for the data we’ve collected over the last few years incl. pictures of our wedding, of our house when it was built from 2005-2006 and about 20GB of self-ripped music from our CDs and around 150 Euros of iTunes music. Of course a lot other date like (yikes! I just recognize while typing) hundreds of Photoshop files (incl. those for this site) and so on and so on. :’(

To make a long story short: I removed one of the 1TB disks from the PC and placed it into the server case. Meanwhile I had installed a Debian on this PC and the last step to have our data secure was to copy the files to the XFS partition. So I tried to mount the NTFS drive. Several times. NTFS-3G in the end told me, that it was not clean unmounted and that I should put this device back to a Windows machine and run chkdsk /p. Ok – not a big story at all, but what I saw gave me a cold shiver on my back. It showed me 4 partitions and an overall capacity of 32MB. Damn!

So I used different tools like the Acronis DiskDirector and several toold from the Hirens Boot CD, no chance. In the end, I gave up. I run some tools and was able to kick the MBR and reinitialize the disk. A WD tool on DOS showed up a size of 931GB – ok – correct size. But – the data is lost.

Luckily, I had a backup of the really important things like the mentioned photos above on three DVD-RAMs. But the mere of the painfully collected data is gone.

Until now, I’m not sure why this happend. Mounting a disk (or trying it with the mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/1tbb) won’t kill data. Maybe it’s because I moved the disk from a Mac RAID to Windows (NTFS) to the Linux OS.

It’s time for a backup plan. Sure – I can live with the lost of the Virtual machines – but the documents and so on need to be placed on a secure media. The most secure one. So I googled and I read in Wikipedia and it turns out, that the DVD-RAM seems to be the most secure one. Ironically I had 12 unused DVD-RAMs at home! DAMN!

So, from now, I will backup important data as well as Photoshop files (which are important for me) to DVD-RAM. No excuses anymore! Windows allows me to use DVD-RAM like a (very slow) harddisk.

Another theme:
A friend of me asked my a few days ago if I could check something inside Vista on the Mac Pro for him. He wanted to know if it shows up 4 or 8 cores in the taskmanager. I was wondering why it just shows up 4 of the 8 cores and so I started watching around the web and I found a little hint, that the Home Premium version that I used on the Mac Pro is limited to 1 processor

WHAT!? Can someone tell me what this is for a kind of shit? Why does a “modern” 64bit just use one processor? Sure, the answer is pretty easy: I should go and by an upgrade to Ultimate. No! Sorry, Microsoft. The Home Premium was expensive enough. This is rude and shows that Microsoft and Apple and all those money-loving companys still think the some. Cut the users possibilities. C’mon. Home Premim – Ultimate. Do you really think, that the kernel is different? Noo!

Finally – I just started thinking if I should run Debian on my Mac Pro. Ironic, isn’t it? The system that crashed my harddisk I think that it was not the reason. But Linux in it’s own way is limited, too. But this depends on Adobe – no Photoshop there :/ So – that’s a no-go. I’m really happy with my Win XP on my ThinkPad here. And currently I was again thinking if it was a soo good idea to buy the Mac Pro and the thoughts about selling it came back.

He – nice deal for everyone who wants to use OSX Mac Pro with 14Gigs of RAM and 2x 1TB Harddisk

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit