This past Friday the first public beta of Windows 7 was release. Well… Sort of.
Apparently there were enough hungry geeks looking for an improvement on Windows Vista to immediately bring Microsoft’s servers to its knees. Long before the beta was actually released at noon, the Microsoft’s product site for Windows 7 and the Windows Team Blog began to show signs of strain. Response was slow or simply non-existent. Come time for the release, trying to download the actual beta proved impossible. It was less than an hour before Microsoft decided to pull back and regroup, putting up a notice that the beta would be available soon.
This didn’t stop the internet from trying to get its hands on it. Direct links were floating around to the .ISO of the beta. I tried to make the links work most of Saturday. I’d get somewhere between 100mb to 500mb before the download failed.
By Saturday morning though, Microsoft officially reposted the beta again for download. This means that keys were now available and were pretty easy to get. After grabbing mine I gave up on the download of the .ISO directly and turned to bit torrent.
In the end, Microsoft has made good on all the trouble. They have lifted the initial 2.5 million download cap and have opened it up completely for the next two weeks.

When it came time for it, installation was a breeze. It required minimal intervention on the part of the user. You select “Next” a handful of times, set your time zone, enter a username, password, and you are pretty much good to go. It took somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes, pretty quick for a Windows OS.

Once I was up and running I started playing with the new toys in Windows 7. Probably most famously, the onscreen Calculator has been upgraded. Any improvement is probably good. The old one worked fine. The new one works just as well. A bit slicker, few new features like calculating gas mileage and dates. It’s probably useful. To be honest I’ve long since replaced my calculator with Google. Enter in my formula and it’s done. And since it’s already my homepage it’s just as easy to get to.

Sticky Notes have been added. It’s just like it sounds. A simple post-it note app, just like is on every other operating system in existence in the moment. Nice of them to catch up on this part but it’s not something I really use.

Now if you take regular screen shots and crop them for some sort of documentation or anything, the new Snipping Tool is a great addition for you. It’s like Snag-It but built in. You out line a portion of the screen and it will load within an editing tool where you can make annotation and save the image. It’s not tied to the PrtSc button though. However this is a tool that I’ve been failing to find a stable version of on the Linux side of things.

Paint has finally been updated. In fact, it’s the first upgrade to the built in draw program since Paintbrush became just Paint in Windows 95. It was probably due for a new feature or two. At first glance it looks like a completely different program. As you begin to mess with it though you see that its more or less the same app, but with a new interface. They’ve moved everything into a variation of the ribbon interface used in the last version of Office. All the regular tools are there, plus a few extras. You have a selection of brushes now. They’ve included some texture brushes, like a crayon, marker, and water-color brush. They are fun to play with. But any graphic artist in search of those things already has much more serious tools for completing the same function. You can also create some additional shapes aside from rectangles and ovals. Now we have triangles, rhombuses, pentagons, hexagons, and arrows. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve drawn a square and said “I like the equilateral sides, but if i could only get it at a 60* degree angle.” Apparently someone at Microsoft thought the same thing. Actually, its nice they’ve added some bells and whistles to what has always been just a toy. With the addition of toggled grid and ruler, you can actually fashion a fair flow chart or two. Additionally when saving your masterpiece, the developers were kind enough to explain the difference between a Jpeg and a Bitmap. My inbox and I thank you.

For home users who are looking to share their media with the household, the Library is the latest Windows solution for doing so. After logging into your Windows 7 installation for the first time, you’ll be asked to create a Home Group for sharing all of your documents and media with other machines. Once you’ve selected your folder, a random, 10 character alpha numeric passwords will be generated. Any other user on the network with this password will have access to all your media without the worry of creating user accounts for everyone. This is fine for home users, but won’t ever fly in a corporate environment. I’m pretty sure Microsoft knows that. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to share anything.

The most noticeable difference in Windows 7 is the new task bar. They’ve opted for more of a dock style functionality that is oh-so trendy these days. Instead of corralling off the quick launch buttons they are pinned straight to the task bar, doubling as the task button when these applications are launched. Also when you open up multiple instances of the same application, they are stacked underneath the icon. Look closely because you only see little shaded lines on the side indicating more than one application, and you must click and select the window you want to swap between them. It’s a nice try, but it doesn’t feel quite right. It’s just not intuitive enough. I find myself opening, then minimizing, and then forgetting about them all together. It’s just not obvious enough what’s going on in the task bar. In some ways it almost feels like I’m using a child’s pretend-laptop that’s supposed to be educational. Fortunately you can adjust your settings to return to a more traditional style task bar.

UAC is considerably less annoying now. If you are running as administrator, the assumption is you know what you are doing and reduces the security level. Now it pretty much only pops up a warning when you install new applications.

The last little thing is the new Action Center. All your various icons and warnings that have been trying to grab your attention in the system tray have now been consolidated into one little white flag icon. It alerts you when there is a message, and you can view a list of the various messages that Windows would like you to be aware of. I think it’s a nice clean way of doing things.

Overall Windows 7 seems to definitely be faster and snappier. With Aero disabled I think it’s even faster than XP. I’ve got it running in a VM with 512MB of RAM, half of the system requirements and its still usable. I think Microsoft might get its wish and actually be able to shoehorn this thing into most netbooks. All the generic drivers don’t seem to be available yet. Loading Windows 7 in a virtual machine I had to stick with the Intel based chipsets when emulating my network adapters. Aside from that everything is running pretty well. I’ve actually replaced XP with this beta for the few things I still use Windows for, and I have yet to have a problem.

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

CPU: TI TMS9900, 3MHz

RAM: 16KB

DISPLAY: 32 x 24 Text
         192 X 256, 16 color

SOUNDS:
3 channels, 5 octaves
1 noise channel (periodic and white)
Upgradeable to a Speech Synthesizer    

AVAILABLE PORTS:
ROM cartridge (on front)
Data storage cassette
Audio/Video output
Joystick input
CPU bus expansion

AVAILABLE PERIPHERALS:
Speech Synthesizer
Peripheral Expansion Box
Data storage cassette
300 baud modem

OS:    ROM BASIC

YEAR: 1981

ORIGINAL PRICE: $525

I remember first seeing one of these at an Uncle’s.  I didn’t see it often.  I got to play with it even less.  The few times I got to use it I played a handful of game cartridges he had.  But I was curious about the prompt.  It was just a ROM BASIC but I had no idea what that was at the time.  I’d type in random thing and get the same error over and over.  There was still a certain amount of enjoyment.  It had a great keyboard that was enjoyable to type on.

Sooner or later I had the notion, “Hey, this is a computer.  It has to at least be able to do math problems”.  After some trial and error I could get it to do arithmetic.  Nothing fancy, but I was extremely excited.  I managed to figure it out completely on my own.

Later it occurred it suddenly dawned on me it was a version of BASIC.  By that point I had learned a bit at school and could now do quite a bit on the system.

Eventually it had been put into storage after being obsolete and useless, never to be seen again.

Cut to present day, I was perusing eBay and had found a piece I wanted to add to my collection.  It was local so I drove to the seller’s house to avoid the extra cost of shipping.  In addition to the piece I purchased off of eBay, the seller had a large collection of TI-99′s.  He was retired elderly geek, who had obviously worked with these machines professionally in some capacity.  He literally had stacks of them, somewhere of 300+ cartridges, and peripherals I had never seen.  I picked up a couple of the TI-99′s.  The got black and chrome I knew and loved, as well as a later beige model I was previously unfamiliar with.  I grabbed a handful of cartridges as well.

I still keep an eye on his eBay store just incase he decides to part with some of his more rare pieces, like the floppy drive expansion case.

Data on the TI-99/4A  computer was obtain from the following sources:

Old-Computers.com Online Museum

Obsolete Technology Website

WordPress 2.7 has just been released and I wasted no time loading it up. It seems like WordPress gets updated as often as the newspaper. I find it comforting to know that its continually being worked on.

With this upgrade comes an interface-lift. Though it wasn’t a terrible interface before, I thought there was some room for improvement and streamlining. Seems that the developers thought it needed a whole lot of improvement. They’ve replaced the dashboard with an AJAX heavy homepage.  It sure looks pretty, but I’m going to need some time with it before I decide how functional it is.  I remain optimistic.

So far actually it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change my work-flow to much.  Administration feels different though.  Had to update a plug-in along with WordPress.  My only complaint at this point is the strange way it refreshes the screen when I click on a tab to the left.  I jump back to the top of my screen and it was a bit disorienting as I was exploring and clicking through menu options.

Update:  The plugin that 2.7 broke is now no longer broke.  Glad because I didn’t like the alternative as much.

Now that you have Windows XP virtualizing on Ubuntu using VirtualBox, it’s reasonable that you will at some point want to use a USB device under Windows. I personally would really like to be able to sync my iPod with iTunes. It takes a bit of tweaking to Ubuntu – Intrepid Ibex to get it running properly. I did a bit of research and after a lot of trial and error I found something that works for me. We’ll cover that here.

First step, adding a user to the VirtualBox group:

This was mentioned in a dialog box during the initial install of VirtualBox, if you remember. To do this goto the System menu, Administration, then Users and Groups at the bottom of the menu.
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The User Settings box will load. Click the Unlock button so we can make changes.

It will prompt for your password. Enter it and click Authenticate.

Now select the user that will be using VirtualBox and click Properties.

Under Account Properties, select the User Privileges tab.

Check the “Use VirtualBox” box and select OK.

Now we need to make a few tweaks to some start-up scripts. Load a terminal window. Type:
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

The text editor will load and display the mountdevsubfs.sh script. At the end of the do_start () function, put in the following lines:
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs "" /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

If you can’t find where to put it just make it look like the picture below.

Save it and exit out of the text editor. Go back to the terminal windows and type:
cat vbox /etc/group

Make note of the line that contains “vboxusers”. Remember the number that is contained within the line. In this case its 126. This is our group ID

Now type:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

The text editor should come back up. Go to the very end of the text and press Enter to create a new line.

Add the text:
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=126,devmode=664 0 0

Take notice of the segment “devgid=126”. 126 is the group ID from the previous step. When setting this up for yourself, change this to reflect your situation. If your group ID is 150 when you type cat vbox /etc/group, then devgid=150 in the following step.

Save and then exit the text editor. Back at the terminal type:
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh

This is the third and final file we need to edit. Enter in the following text:
## Mount the usbfs for use with Virtual Box
domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev,devgid=126,devmode=664

It must be entered right above the section labled # Mount spufs, if Cell Broadband Processor is detected

Again save and exit the text editor. Reboot Ubuntu.

Now we should be ready to connect a USB device to the virtual machine. Pick a usb drive and plug it in. If Ubuntu automatically mounts it, dismount it, but leave it plugged in.

Load up VirtualBox, and go to the Settings for the virtual machine as in the last tutorial.

Go to the USB tab in the settings, of to the right is several icons. The second one has a green plus. Click on it and it should show any USB devices you have plugged, mounted or not. Select the one you want to use under the VM and it will add it to the large box in the middle. Make sure all the check boxes are checked. It should end up looking like below.

Now, next time when the virtual machine is loaded, it should load the connected USB device to the virtualized operating system.

If you are still having problems, double check the files that were edited to match what’s shown here. I had to do a lot of researching to find out what was consistent among the various tutorials out there. These instructions will probably only work properly with the Intrepid Ibex version of Ubuntu. If you are using VirtualBox on Windows XP, I had no trouble getting USB to work right off the bat. Haven’t had the opportunity to run it on a Mac so I can’t say what issue there might be. Regarding other flavors of Linux, check with the VirtualBox support pages to see what kind of configuration changes you may need to make.

References:

VirtualBox Documentation

Ubuntu Unleashed: Howto – Install VirtualBox in Ubuntu Hardy Heron with USB Support in 5 easy Steps!

Welcome back.  This next portion of the VirtualBox tutorial is going to go over setting up a virtual machine to install your desired operating system on.  At this point you should have already covered the easy installation steps of VirtualBox Part 1.

Starting up VirtualBox should present the main screen.  <sarcasm> I’m sure this is very counterintuitive for a lot of you out there but press the New button to create a new VM </sarcasm>

VirtualBox provides us with a wizard that makes this whole process pretty painless.  Click next to get started.

You’ll need to name your virtual machine and select what kind of OS you’ll be installing.  You can name it whatever you want, and there is a selection for your most common operating systems.  I’m going to use XP for the example.  The reason being the same as why most of us still keep a copy of Windows around, because there is that one application we still can’t do without.

The next step in the wizard asks how much RAM you would like to turn over to your virtual machine.  It has a recommendation already entered for you.  I don’t know what would happen by assigning an unusual amount of RAM to a virtual OS.  It would probably work just fine, but I feel more comfortable assigning a more familiar number.  I’m assigning 512mb here.  That’s generally XP’s sweet spot and I have the RAM to spare.  Also I want the application I’m going to be using to be reasonably functional.  I would recommend against giving it more RAM than is installed in your system.  Adjust the slide bar or enter the figure in manually to the text box to assign your RAM.

Now we need to create a virtual hard disk.  There are none existing at this point, and unless I’m deleting a previous VM, I’m not sure what the point of using an existing virtual disk would be.  Bottom line; click “New” to create a new disk.

Another wizard is going to pop up.  Click “Next” and you’ll get a choice between a dynamic and fixed-sized image.  Dynamic images will only be as large as the data stored on the virtual machine.  If you create a 10 gigabyte virtual disk and you only have 3 gigabytes combined data from your operating system and applications, then you are only storing 3 gigabytes of data on your actual hard disk.  This is useful if free space is at a premium or you are using a lot of VMs.  The downside is a cost in performance, slowing down your virtual machine session.

Contrast to a fixed-size image, where if you create a 10 gig virtual disk, you are going to take up 10 gigs actual hard disk space.  If you have plenty of disk space to spare, then not only will you receive better performance, you won’t have to worry about VirtualBox running out of disk space as your virtual disk expands.

Given all of that the choice is yours.  It doesn’t affect much else from this point on.  I’ve selected “Dynamically expanding image” on this tutorial because I am running on a laptop with limited drive space.  Make your selection and click “Next”.

You’ll need to label your image file in the blank field marked “Image File Name”.  I’m keeping mine the same as my virtual machine name for clarity.  Adjust the slide or enter a number for the image size just as you did for the RAM setting.  Click “Next”

Final screen for the Virtual Disk creation just gives a summary of what was selected.

Clicking “Finish” returns me to the previous wizard.  My newly created virtual disk has been selected.  Click “Next” again.

Again at the end of the wizard we get another summary page.  Clicking Finish will return me back to the main VirtualBox screen.

You’ll see a new entry in the list to the left showing your new virtual machine, its current state, and details regarding the virtual hardware to the right.

Before installing an operating system on to the VM, let go through some of the additional settings.  Select the virtual machine just created and click on “Settings”.  From the Settings window you can create additional virtual disks, mount CDs, and adjust hardware properties for your VM.

Select the CD/DVD-ROM tab so we can mount your Windows install disk.

Check the box next to “Mount CD/DVD Drive”.  You can use and actual CD or DVD by selecting “Host CD/DVD Drive”.  I’ve actually had better luck using an ISO image I made to backup my CD so I recommend the second option.

To choose an ISO image, click the folder icon on the right side of the window.

It will bring up the Virtual Disk Manager.  Click the Add button on the top tool bar.

Browse and select the ISO image you want to use as a CD.  Click Open.

The image will now be listed in the Virtual Disk Manager.  Highlight the image from the list and click “Select”

At this point we can install Windows onto the virtual machine.  Depending on how you are going to use your VM your can go into the Audio tab and select the type of audio device you want to simulate, and add USB devices under the USB tab.  At this point we just want to get up and running so we’ll worry about that later.  Press OK to return to the main VirtualBox screen.

Click the Start button at the top of the window and the virtual machine should start to boot.

First time around you’ll get a Information box explaining the “host key”.  Basically, when working within a virtual machine, the computers keyboard and mouse are taken over by the VM.  The “host key” toggles control of the keyboard and mouse between the virtual machine and the real computers operating system.  So, if you are working within your virtual machine and suddenly your email client dings because you’ve received a new message,  you can’t check it while your stuck in the VM window.  Press the host key and you can now go check your email.  By default this is the Ctrl key on the right.

If you got a grasp on this, go ahead and check the “Do not show this message again” box and click OK to continue.  The VM will start to boot and before you know it you are running the Windows XP setup off your CD image.

The Windows XP installation will proceed like any other.  I’m not going to bother covering it here because it has no relation to how VirtualBox works.  If you are following along go ahead and finish your Windows install and pickup here when you’ve finished.

Next posting will cover how to get USB working under your virtual machine.