meddlingBanter

A couple weeks ago I installed Windows 7 on my laptop, so I’m currently dual booting it and Ubuntu.  I went with the 64-bit version of 7 and I must say it’s been a happy experience thus far.  The installation couldn’t have lasted more than 15 min.  From there, I logged on and while not everything worked right out of the box, for the most part things did.  I did have to go searching around Dells website for 64-bit drivers that would work with my laptop though.  Things like sound and media buttons weren’t working exactly right.  Dell doesn’t provide specific 64-bit drivers for my laptop, but they do for laptops with a similar configurations.  WIth little to no research I found where to get those and surprisingly everything is now working.

One functionality I did have to muck around with though was getting all the nice touchpad options for scrolling in explorer and viewing WebPages.  I finally found a working driver for my touchpad on Toshibas website thanks to a little Googling and reading random forums.  It was also necessary to give all users (at least the quick fix I found) full access to the Alps Touchpad program directory so every time I started my machine I didn’t have to go through 10 UAC prompts.  Running the app in Vista compatibility mode didn’t even solve that problem so that’s the solution I’ve ended up using. 

For right now I’ve just got the basics installed: Firefox (64-bit and 32), 7-Zip (64-bit, getting the idea?), VLC, and the Windows Live suite.  I primarily use my laptop for when I’m gone on the weekends, which is nearly every weekend, so I don’t need a great deal of software on here, and most of the apps I do need are on the Linux partition.  I must say though everything just seems cleaner and polished.  While Windows 7 is clearly an evolution of Vista, its definitely more than that.  It’s a no nonsense version of Vista.  Windows 7 is more organized, more detailed, and just what an operating system should be. 

Sometimes I need to reboot my PC at home.  Normally this goes without a hitch, but windows can hang, or at least my box does sometimes.  This happened today while I was away.  On a normal hang one might just hit the reset button and be up and running on minutes.  I didn’t have that option.  I tried CTRL + ALT + ESC to bring up the task manager but this didn’t work.  All I got was an error saying Windows could not bring up the task manager because it was shutting down. 

The solution I found come by hitting CTRL + ALT + END.  This key combo brings up the Security Box one would normally access from the start menu when connected through Remote Desktop.  From here you can force Windows to shutdown or reboot.  Pretty slick.

I’ll be spending this weekend at the Rothbury Music Festival in Rothbury, MI.  The festival is being held at this place called the Double JJ Ranch.  I’ve never been there but its supposed to be beautiful and is generally a popular resort ranch here in Michigan.  Abby said she had been there before when she was little since her father works near there.

This is the first music festival in Michigan of this stature, something reminiscent of Bonnaroo.  Lots of good people are gonna be there, most notably Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Snoop Dogg, and Modest Mouse. I’m most looking forward most to see Snoop, then after that Trey Anastasio, Mike Gorden, Panjea, STS9, Keller WIlliams , MICHAEL FRANTI AND SPEARHEAD  and Perpetual Groove. Hopefully I’ll be able to send updates to my facebook and twitter while there, otherwise I’ll post up some pics and commentary of the events the are sure to ensue after I return home.  Have a great 4th.

“Can you scan a spreadsheet into my computer so I can work on it?”

Tonight I finished setting up my new firewall/gateway based on the lastest Ubuntu server edition.  I actually finished this last Thursday but that machine crapped out on me the day after I had everything configured correctly.  It was an old P3 system with around 512 MB of PC-133 in it.  Not the greatest system but plenty for a home Gateway/Firewall.  The HDs I used in the machine were a couple I had laying around, 8 GB and 10 GB setup in an LVM.  I figured they might have had a little more life in them and 18 GB would be plenty of space for this system.  Well I guess they were a little too old as they both stopped working the next day, in fact the computer doesn’t even recognize them at boot time.  I’ve had trouble on that system before, sometimes detecting a drive, sometimes not, so it may just be the board as well.  I decided not to waste anymore time with that old machine and now I’m using Abby’s old emachine.

Things went rather smooth after my second install this afternoon.  I had installed it over the weekend at Abby’s (on her machine, not the machine that died), but her internet was flaky and wouldn’t work during the install of Ubuntu so I wasn’t able to configure some things during the initial install and that seemed to give me all kinds of errors this morning when I went to finish things up.  Also I spent a good amount of time troubleshooting a problem with one of my network cards, in that it would initialize but I couldn’t connect to the computer through the LAN to it which had me googling and scratching my head for some time.  I then decided to open up the case and try to reseat the NIC.  The card was actually not seated all the way so I pushed it in then rebooted and it worked perfectly.  Next time I won’t be in such a hurry and actually screw in the NICs.

After fixing that problem I had one more issue with that NIC after finishing up the second install. For some reason it would only register as a 10 Mbit half-duplex NIC, when it was capable of 100 Mbit full-duplex mode.  Turns out this is an issue with the card and certain switches.  The card just doesn’t detect the type of network its on properly.  I forced the card into the proper mode and now things are good to go.

Right now the f/g is pretty basic.  I have three NICs in it, one connected to my switches/OPEN-WRT AP, one to the cable modem, and the third will be used for another AP I plan to have an open wireless network on.  I installed smoothwall to configure my firewall as well as bind and a DHCP server.  I don’t really like all those services running on that box so I may leave bind on there and move the DHCP server back to the OPEN-WRT router or maybe to my other Ubuntu Server.  I really just wanted to install the dhcpd3 server on there to learn how to configure it.  With those minor hicups things are running smooth now.