Windows Versions

Last night was thinking on Windows, and its version numbering. I remember Windows 3.1. It was the last windows to have a number version before the recent Windows 7. That means we had 3 versions of windows that had being named other things. As we had more than 3 windows versions in this time, that means that some of them were not considered by Microsoft as major versions but as revisions (or crap).

Let us look at the list (I am omitting NT versions deliberately):

• Windows 95
• Windows 98
• Windows 2000
• Windows ME
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

I think there is no doubt that Windows 95 was a new version, major release. Let’s call it Windows 4. In turn, Windows 98, while more stable than Windows 95, did not bring much novelty. At the moment the biggest change I recall is USB support. But there are other enhancements, I am sure. But we can not call it Windows 5 or we waste all versions too fast.

Windows 2000 was the first try to merge NT with Windows desktop.  I recall to use it a lot of time, and it was stable (well, stable for a Windows). News? At least NTFS support and the supposed stability of NT. I think we should call it Windows 5.

About Windows ME, I think I do not have to make any comment. It is not a major version nor a minor version. I think it is not an operating system at all. I think that, from the list, it is the worst piece of software to date. Including Vista.

Follows Windows XP. This one is running for some time, and did not disappear with Vista. Unfortunately (for Microsoft), it made the Windows XP usage higher. Nobody really used or use Vista for work. If they say they do, they do not work. Therefore, Windows XP is Windows 6. No doubts, there.

Vista, accordingly with Microsoft, should be the successor, a major release. Unfortunately (for them) this piece of software is crap. I can not call it a minor version of Windows XP, nor a major version of Windows. I think Microsoft understood that, and that is why they are calling 7 to the new Windows version.

Testing Linux II: Mandriva

The next linux to test was Mandriva. I recall to use Mandrake some years ago. First point regarding Mandriva, is that I downloaded the DVD version. That means I was installing with more than 4GB of software on my DVD drive. Why that is relevant? Keep reading.

The installation was easy. The interface is quite good, although not as detailed as OpenSuse installation, but better than Fedora interface. Regarding this installation, my main complain is to have Portugal listed in the secondary countries list, while some strange countries appear in the main countries list. Also, that wouldn’t be bad if it was more intuitive to select.

Regarding the installation, I miss the detailed information about what is going on. Mandriva keeps showing screenshots of their linux desktops. Also, that is a stupid thing to do, as in a small screenshot you can not detect any difference on the image for the different Mandriva distributions. Probably a list of features would be better. Lack of reflection for the Mandriva product managers.

It all went correctly until the wireless configuration. The laptop has a Intel 3945 802.11g Wireless card. It is not that recent, and there are open source drivers available. In fact, it seems that most recent kernels include this driver. But Mandriva does not include it in the 4GB of software. Oh, and I was using the 2010.0 distribution.

Probably to include more drivers and less crap would help users. I do not care if I need to use the internet connection to download gnome or kde widgets. But I really care if I need to use the internet connection to download the wireless driver, that does not let me to connect to the internet to download… yeah… kind of remembers me of BOFH story of sending by email the password to read the email.

Now I am wondering. If I need to install drivers by hand, probably the best is to go back to my predilection linux distributions, like Slackware or Arch Linux. At least these assume they are not for common desktop users. Well, the other option is to test ubuntu or debian.

Testing Linux I: OpenSuse and Fedora

I got a PC laptop for work with… Windows. Decided to install a Linux on it, and decided to give a look at current distributions. At the moment I was looking for a non-newbie system but with some basic configuration issues automated. For example, I desesperate when I need to configure a wireless manually. I think that is a task that should be easy to perform and not consume much time.

My first option was OpenSuse. I knew Suse for a long time and never tried it for being commercial. Now this was the chance to look and check what they have been doing. First, the installation wizard is really good. Not just good aspect, but also functional. It detects everything and reports the detections to the user. That is great. Also, when installing a boot loader, if it fails, it tries to help the user to correct the configuration and try to install it again.

Also, it lets you to choose between installing a KDE or Gnome based desktop. Also, a XFCE option is there. That is great. I love XFCE. Probably this choice was the reason I did not like OpenSuse, but who knows. So, when booting, the X Login Manager is based on TWM, that sucks. But that is not relevant. Login worked correctly, but when configuring the wireless device, it couldn’t connect to the wireless network. I could not find why. It did not complain with the password. It did not complain about lack of signal (no idea about its power, btw). It just said it configured the network device, and exited the configuration tool. Tried a few minutes to find out what was going on with iwconfig and ifconfig, but decided to try a new distribution.

Next try was Fedora. I know lot of people using Fedora. It is not an old distribution, but given that they use a big base from RedHat, it should be somewhat stable. Booted the live-cd and used the installer available on it. That is good because it lets you use a linux system while you are installing other linux system. That is cool. The installer, itself, is equal to the first fedora installer (at least I did not find big differences). The windows are not well designed (widgets not correctly placed…), but it is enough for the installation task.

But that isn’t my complain. My complain is that, after half hour installing the system, anaconda crashed when installing the Grub bootloader. Instead of an error message I got a Python backtrace. And that sucks. First, because I hate Python. Second, because it crashed the installation, forcing me to restart the installation.

No, I will not retry fedora now, I think. I will download another linux version.

Hope I can find any interesting distro that is not Ubuntu (I have different complains about it… for a future post).

Moblin 2.1 – First Impressions

After some disasters with Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire One (it just stopped working, X crashing and other problems) I tried moblin again. Installed version 2.1 beta and my first impression is that it is more stable than 2.0 at the moment.

The browser seems more stable, loading pages faster. Unfortunately the flash plugin is not fast enough. Who knows if it works better next time. Although this is true, there is a huge difference between a common linux browser (like Firefox) time to load a page and moblin time.

Regarding connections with the world, the gtalk account was configured correctly at first. Regarding Twitter, it took some more time. First because it opened a browser, but did not say it would do that, and I closed it. And the second time the browser did not start. After some time I found out what was happening (moblin needed the Twitter PIN code) and I was able to register. After two minutes twitter updates weren’t available yet. After five minutes the first updates started appearing. Unfortunately after 30 minutes of work I wasn’t able to twit yet.

Tried as well the tool to watch pictures. It started a slideshow, but the slideshow window was covered by the moblin window. Fail…

Later tonight I’ll do some more experiments…

tar guessing compression method

Finally (not sure how long ago, but I just found out about it three days ago) the tar unix utility (gnu version) can guess what the compression method to use. Now I can forget that -j is used for bzip2, -z is used for gzip, and some other for xz.
Just use ‘tar axf’ for extraction, and ‘tar acf’ for compression. Everything else is guessed from the file extension!