Up until a couple of days ago I still hadn’t tried out Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 which I downloaded a long time ago. Unfortunately, I discovered that the ethernet driver for VMware doesn’t work (and it used to in Beta 2), and so I was forced to wait until a convenient moment to install it on a physical machine (which wasn’t going to be my main desktop, funnily enough).

Windows Vista’s installer is still pathetically fussy about where it will allow you to install Vista. It requires installation to the first primary partition on a hard drive which is master.

Well, that’s really convenient, considering that my partition layout on the first hard drive on this machine was as follows:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1912    15358108+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            1913        1988      610470   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4            3009        4870    14956515    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            4054        4870     6562521   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3009        4053     8393899+  83  Linux

hda1 was my CentOS server installation, hda5 was a few gigs of data left over from somewhere else, and hda6 was my Ubuntu Dapper installation. Of course, the Windows install required the monopoly on hda1, which currently was occupied.

Well, thank goodness for the flexibility of Linux. I simply used the low level tool dd to make images of all the partitions (onto a spare 160 GB drive also in that machine), and then wiped off the disk.

One Vista install later, and the drive now had just one primary partition of rougly 17 GB with Vista on it.

I then created a partition to match the size of the CentOS install, and dd‘d the image back. After tweaking a few configuration files via the Ubuntu Live distro, I then rebooted with my GRUB bootloader CD in the drive, typed in the boot commands and CentOS booted like nothing had happened.

I then reinstalled GRUB to the hard drive (with a boot menu obviously, I don’t type boot commands every boot!) and added Vista to the list of OSs to boot.

The Ubuntu Dapper partition unfortunately would no longer fit (by about 2 GB), as Vista is now using a lot of the space, but instead I installed Edgy, and I’ll recover the important files off Dapper when I need them.

So after about half a day of partition shuffling, it now looks like:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        2040    16384000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            2040        4870    22733220    5  Extended
/dev/hda5            2040        3952    15359384+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3953        3985      265041   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7            3986        4870     7108731   83  Linux

hda1 is now Vista (NTFS), hda5 is CentOS, hda6 is Linux swap (for both) and hda7 is Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

The things I do to test Vista…

If anyone wants to use BoxCheck (a Firefox extension that allows you to shift-click to select multiple tick boxes on web forms) on Firefox 2.0, I’ve updated it to make it compatible.

Note that this is hacked – all I’ve done is change the supported versions in the script to work with 2.0. It works for me, but if it eats your Firefox, don’t come complaining (execute FF with -safe-mode to remove it if it kills it).

You will have to add me to the list of allowed sites to install software, but don’t worry, it’s pure BoxCheck just with a hacked install file (you can verify for yourself, just Save Target As the .xpi, rename to .zip and explore it).

Tutorial on how to hack your favourite FF 1.5.x extensions to work with FF 2.0 coming soon.

Fortysomething.ca have a slightly different than normal Windows XP theme – Royale Noir.

UPDATE: Please note that the freely available Zune theme is very similar (and feels a lot more finished than this theme.

It’s not perfect – some bits like the scrollbars are still standard blue Royale, but it makes a change for those becoming-dangerously-rare times when I’m in Windows (without hacking uxtheme.dll).

And the reason you don’t have to hack that file is because this is an official signed theme by Microsoft – albeit one they hadn’t finished and didn’t intend to publish.

Yes, I’m slow to this. I saw it on Digg about a week ago and I downloaded it, unrared it and put it on my shared partition, but didn’t get round to actually installing it in Windows until now. 7-Zip will unrar it for you, don’t get WinRAR, it’s arguably evil (I shouldn’t have to pay to decompress files, it’s just ridiculous).

According to Ars Technica, the first crack for Vista and Office 2007 has surfaced.

Unlike a normal crack, however, this one just replaces some of the key Windows and Office files (presumably the activation and ‘revenue protection’ DLLs) with their contemporaries from the earlier releases. That means you can use Beta or Release Candidate activation keys on the final release and use the final versions.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention whether the cracked versions have the expiry date that the pre-release versions had (software with an expiry date? Now that sucks).

No doubt they’ll just block the beta keys very soon via Windows Update or Windows Genuine-we’re-going-to-make-you-run-some-stupid-software Validation.

Do you think I was going to wait for Red Hat to package the official Fedora version of Firefox 2.0?

Aside from Mozilla being silly about names, I absolutely adore this browser. What’s more, only a few of my extensions weren’t compatible and I’m sure they’ll be updated very quickly.

And it’s so much faster than 1.5.0.x too, and aside from still having ugly buttons in forms on Linux (and the Mac as well), it’s beautiful.

W00t! I love this browser! OK, fine, I’ll try and return to sanity, I know, it’s only a browser, but it’s an app I’m going to be staring at for a long time until Firefox 3.0…

I did it for (Ubuntu) Linux and now it’s the turn of Windows to get some screen recording love with pyvnc2swf. The installation procedure on Windows is also fairly simple, but unfortunately because Windows doesn’t ship with Python (unlike well, say, Linux and Mac OS X and most other Unix systems) we have to install that first.

So without any further ado, we’ll get going.

» Read the rest of this post…

When I reported on Gizbuzz about EA including spyware in Battlefield 2142, I obviously wasn’t happy about it.

Thankfully, though, BF2142 wasn’t a game I was planning on getting.

However, Joystiq seem to reckon that Need for Speed Carbon will also include this ridiculous ‘software’.

I was thinking about getting Carbon (on the Windows platform) when it came out. I’m not anymore.

Hey, EA, you just lost a customer! Well done…

Sorry about the title – but I am not happy with Microsoft today.

According to Slashdot, Windows Vista, the full (rip-off?) retail version of Vista, will only allow you to transfer it to another machine once.

Put in real terms – retail Vista will not allow you to have the freedom to move it around between your machines.

» Read the rest of this post…

Just had a very quick play with Firefox 2.0 RC2.

The new icon theme is nice and there are various enhancements to the feed functionality and UI and stuff.

But by far, the best thing about FF 2.0 I’ve seen so far is that it is fast

On an AMD Sempron 2600+ (this is not my main system, a P4 3.0 GHz) it goes from nought to loaded up and ready to go in 1.05 seconds. Compare that to 1.5.0.4 (yes, it’s old because it’s a SLED 10 system and I don’t have any updates on it) which hobbles along and gets there in 2.88 seconds.

I’m officially fired up about Firefox 2.0 now – the only bad thing will be waiting for extensions to get compatibility (though I might resort to tweaking the install.js files if necessary).

(Why am I so fired up about less than 3 seconds? Because it really does make a difference to have your app instantly respond to you.) I’ll have the same for Thunderbird, please (TB 1.5.0.7 is not very quick to start up either).

I like it!

Disclaimer: my timing is in no way scientific, I just used a stopwatch, so they’re probably really inaccurate. But you get the gist, it’s fast and if you still don’t believe me, download it and test it against the latest 1.5.0.x build.

A while back I got an invite to Windows Live Mail Beta; basically, Hotmail 2.0. So I’ve finally got round to doing a short screencast showing off its interface, a couple of new features and me explaining my thoughts on the new service.

First of all, I’d like to apologise for the fact that the Firefox window is cut off and subsequently there’s some of the window that you can’t see. It’s not a major issue, but still, annoying and not worth re-recording for. Next time I’ll resize the window to exactly 720×576 to prevent this problem happening again (it’s an Adobe Premiere Elements thing).

Stay tuned for full size 720×576 XviD version, it will be available for download soon.

XviD 720×576 version now available for download. Download now!