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As of yesterday, the latest Ubuntu release ‘Hardy Heron‘ is available for download (both client and server). Every time a major Linux distri(bution) hits ‘the shelves’, the Linux community roars. With each release (Ubuntu or whatever flavor) the Linux community gets closer, and closer to Windows.

Even though the OS itself is getting better and better. It still lacks the support of decent major software like Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It’s missing the software people use in every day (business)life.
Sure, there a million different ways of running Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on a Linux OS, but these require a commercial piece of software (CrossOver) , or in depth knowledge of the OS to make it work (Wine in some cases). Two things that shouldn’t be required. Not if you’re used to Windows (or Apple’s OSX). And even if you find a ’substitute’ it’s most likely to have an awful user experience.

The average housewife won’t use Linux, because her friends all use Windows. All those nice little Windows programs, which makes life easier (or a living hell with all the mal/spyware out there). So if the Linux community wants to make a difference they need to create some sort of critical mass (by their selves, or by Microsoft screwing up) to get the attention of the ‘normal’ user. But in a community where there’s no real (commercial) business model, it’s gonna be damn hard.

Microsoft created this critical mass by playing (probably) the best marketing trick in the world; Release Windows 95, and turn a blind eye to those who use a pirated copy at home. The home users create demand on the workfloor, so businesses start to use it on their workstations. Soon everyone was addicted. And now it’s damn hard to beat the addiction.

B.t.w., Apple is doing it a lot better. They created a nice and stable OS (just like the average Linux desktop distribution), BUT the OS has ALL the relevant drivers for the hardware used. ALSO they have a complete (and cheap) software suite (iLife and iWork), which is more than enough for the average family. No need to search the caverns of the Internet for software, and they look and feel the same as the OS.

So, I guess that my conclusion is that the OS is nearing perfection, but it (Linux in general) lacks good and decent third party software (and a good marketing machine )

In the mean time; I’m gonna upgrade my Linux (mail, web, and ssh) servers at work to ‘Hardy Heron’.

Since I have an iMac with OSX 10.5 (Leopard), I use TimeMachine for my backups. This works great actually. But I also need an off-site backup of some sort. Just in case the house burns down or that some f*cker decides to steal my hardware.
So I bought an external Freecom 160GB USB2 drive (USB powered) for my off-site backups.

I encrypted the entire harddisk with TrueCrypt 5.0 on my iMac, and copied the data I needed to preserve. After that I wanted to access the data from my work laptop (Windows XP SP2 with TrueCrypt v5.0)….. This didn’t work. TrueCrypt didn’t recognize the password, or the encrypted disk (AES / SHA-256 full disk encryption).
I tried to access the data on my Mac and everything worked, so there’s no data corruption of some sort. Eventually, I recreated the encrypted drive on my Windows XP laptop (lost the backup in the process). This time the disk would mount, and could also be read/mounted by my Mac.

So, I guess that TrueCrypt is Cross-platform, but with the current version (v5.0a) you need to make sure to create the volume on Windows if you also want to mount it on OSX.

I reported this through their bug-reporting tool to the developers. No idea if there are similar problems with Linux.

UPDATE: Pretty soon they released v5.0a, and today v5.1 was released. So development goes on

Tried to use my new Nokia E61i for surfing the Internet with my laptop (Windows XP), but this just wouldn’t work. Errors were plenty, but no bit made it to the Internet for some reason. Strange, because my older 6230 (or whatever model it was) worked perfectly.

After cursing a couple of times, I needed to make sure that this wasn’t a defect in the phone, so I tried it with my Mac Book Pro (which is for sale by the way ). Obviously, this worked straight away. Just used the same settings / profile from my older phone….

Windows never keeps to amaze me (in a negative way that is).

Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Windows 2003 this week. Normally, the release will be announced, but this time they released it quietly (??).

Anyway, I tried to upgrade my experimental Windows 2003 SP1 server with SP2, but that was a no-go. It seems that if yo uninstalled Internet Explorer 7 AFTER you installed sp1, you need to uninstall IE7 (according to the release notes).

Internet Explorer
If you installed Internet Explorer 7 after installing Windows Server 2003 SP1, you must uninstall Internet Explorer 7 before you install Windows Server 2003 SP2.

After this you can install Service Pack 2. This means 2 reboots instead of 1 (are we going back to the old days where you needed a reboot every time you sneezed??)

First of all, I didn’t want IE7, but it got pushed down my throat in their so-called ‘critical updates’. And second, this confirms the lack of inter-department communication in Redmond, otherwise this wouldn’t be necessary….

And the fun continues…. After uninstalling IE7 I received an ‘Access Denied’ error while updating. Research on that error gave me some pages relating to Windows XP service pack installations. It seems that there might be some registry keys which are not modify-able by the installation of SP2.
For godsake, I run the update under the administrator account. Why can’t the installer modify the registry setting for me? Why do I have to screw around with the registry editor and logfiles to install a freakin’ service pack from Microsoft ?

The Windows box goes out the window, as soon I have enough money to get me a OSX based server….

UPDATE: The update via Windows Update also didn’t work. It didn’t show the Access Denied error, but it wouldn’t install SP2. I did get it to work though by ‘resetting’ the permissions on the registry with the following command:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

A while ago, I thougt that I had contracted a virus on my Windows laptop from work. Unfortunately, there’s no chance that I can migrate to a Mac there :-(.

The strangest things were happening on my laptop. Suddenly there appeared strange pieces of text in Word documents, and in e-mails I was writing. My first reaction was that someone was typing along with me.

After scanning my laptop with three virus scanners and using several anti-spyware software suites, it turned out that there was nothing wrong. After that the uninvited pieces of text were gone….. Until yesterday. But this time I had a clue what had happened.

I use the keyboard a lot for copy, and pasting (CTRL-C and CTRL-V). It seems that WINDOWS-V starts voice recognition. I must have pressed the wrong key combination. This key combo starts with a dialog box explaining that the mic needs tuning. I canceled that dialog, but somehow the voice recognition is still being enabled. There’s no visual indication that it’s running.

It seems that Windows doesn’t recognize the Dutch language, and therefor it starts guessing what you say and displays that in the focussed window.

Lame ass Windows functionality if you ask me…….

LOL… I already reported that Windows Mobile 5 is buggy as hell. Even Trend Micro thought so. Well, nothing new if you ask me.

The upgrade versions of Windows Vista are less expensive than the normal retails versions. If you want to install the upgrade it should be done from within (a legitimate copy of) Windows XP. There is however a workaround which doesn’t need the presence of a Windows XP installment, or even the original Windows XP CD.

1. Boot with the Windows Vista Upgrade DVD.
2. Click “Install Now.”
3. Do not enter a Product Key When prompted.
4. When prompted, select the Vista product edition that you do have.
5. Install Vista normally.
6. Once the install is complete, restart the DVD-based Setup from within Windows Vista. Perform an in-place upgrade.
7. Enter your Product Key when prompted.

That saves some money on the purchase of Windows Vista. It also saves you from installing a ‘lesser’ OS (which I personally doubt) first with all of its own problems etc.. I personally think that upgrading is always bad. Better start a new, and fresh installment of any OS (even Mac OSX).

Arstechnica has an article explaining OEM (mainly the difference between the Microsoft Vista OEM and retail versions)

Buying OEM versions of Windows Vista: the facts

It seems that anyone who can install software is eligible to purchase a Vista OEM copy, without extra hardware.

Can I buy OEM?

Yes, you can. Microsoft licenses OEM software to “system builders,” which the license defines as “an original equipment manufacturer, or an assembler, reassembler, or installer of software on computer systems” (emphasis added). You can install software on computers, right?

When asked, Microsoft says that OEM software is not intended to be installed by end users. Off the record, Microsoft spokespeople have told me that the big concern in Redmond is for Joe Newbie. They don’t want inexperienced users buying OEM software, but the fact of the matter is that anyone can buy OEM versions of Windows.

Truth be told, Microsoft is not opposed to the practice. Rather, the company says that people who purchase OEM software will simply be expected to abide by the terms of the licensing agreements.

Today is the official launch of the newest operating system (OS) from Microsoft, and it’s called Windows Vista.

All over the world shops opened early (even at midnight) to give the public the change to buy this new OS. Tons of people (at least that’s what they had hoped) would be gathering in front of these shops to be the first….. Well, that didn’t work out that well.
It seems that only a hand full of nerds were standing in the cold to be the first. There were no lines, or riots as we have seen with the launch of the PlayStation 3 or the Nintendo Wii.

Here in Holland, there was a computer shop which opened at midnight and served about 90 customers…. 90 on a total of over 14 million people.

I guess pricing, and lack of available drivers is to blame. It’s by far the most expensive workstation/desktop OS released by Microsoft (the most expensive retail version is over 500 euros). Most of the people will be getting Vista when buying a new PC, and the rest will probably be using a pirated version of the OS (or switch to Mac or Linux).

No Vista for me anyway.

The new and improved security in Microsoft Vista regarding DRM may have (and probably will) have great consequences for the end-user. Peter Gutman published his research on the DRM features in Windows Vista, and his findings are staggering.

The biggest concerns are related to hardware certification revocation, and dynamically downscaling quality.

Dynamically downscaling qualit means that if Vista plays some DRM enabled media on the PC (HD-DVD, or whatever), all other in and outputs are degraded. This means that your high quality pr0n has a lousy quality, while you’re listening to DRM enabled music….. Well that suck, but implications can be huge, as Peter Gutman explained.

Furthermore, the revocation of driver certificates. If, somehow, a driver signing certificate gets stolen from a manufacturer, Microsoft has the ability to revoke that particular certificate. This means that the complete install base for that drives becomes totally useless. It could mean that your PC won’t be able to boot (and everyone else’s) if you have that particular brand of motherboard. What if key public services become useless because of this driver revocation? No more fresh water, traffic lights gone haywire??

Peter also mentiones that the DRM scheme in general is very weak;

Note B: I’ll make a prediction at this point that, given that it’s trying to do the impossible, the Vista content protection will take less than a day to bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple security hole that applies only to one piece of code (and can therefore be quickly patched), and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn’t mean it’ll be broken the day or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker is motivated to bypass the protection, it’ll take them less than a day or a week to do so.

Funny thing is that engadget recently posted an article about a piece of software that claims to remove DRM from HD-DVD movies…… So Peter’s thoughts on that weren’t that far off :).

Personally I think that the entire Music and Movie industry needs to come to their senses, and stop treating every customer as a criminal. But unfortunatelly, I don’t think that that’s gonna happen
soon.

The latest iPod killer from Microsoft (the Zune), has been ‘hacked‘. A pretty simple registry hack (on your PC) is all it takes to access the device as a mass storage device and copy stuff form it.

Also, just rename any file extension to .jpg (image file extension) and ’share’ them among other Zune users.
A firmware upgrade will probably disable these features in the future.

Another (unconfirmed) hack is to enable special features on the Zune, so that it can be used as a paper-weight :). I wonder if this really works, because I could use a good paper-weight.

Microsoft released the MSDN versions of Windows Vista, and Office 2007. Since I have (legitimate) access to the MSDN downloads, I downloaded both ISO files.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any spare hardware available for testing Windows Vista, so I decided to install it in a Virtual Machine.
First I installed it in Parallels on my Mac Book Pro (see earlier post), but I needed something more portable for work, so I installed it in VMWare Workstation.

The installation was a piece of cake, but the VMWare Tools seem to be as buggy as the Parallel tools. You install these tools to enhance the user performance (seamless mouse), and add drivers for network adapter, etc. Both virtualisation software packages fail to shutdown the Vista OS properly. Probably has something to do with the ACPI drivers included in the tools.

Anyway, that will most likely be solved with an update for both pieces of software in the next weeks. For now, I’ve got a proper Virtual Machine running Windows Vista Ultimate with Office 2007 Professional.

Let the evaluation begin.

B.t.w. I just hate the shutdown button on Vista. There’s no confirmation on if you actually want to shut the system down. The old XP interface was better, but perhaps it’s behavior is configurable.

First the Music bought online (DRM protected) won’t play on the Zune, and now it seems that the Zune doesn’t work with the new OS Windows Vista (at this moment).

Well, that’s just great.

Microsoft has released their latest Internet Browser, and the new features are phenomenal.

LOL

Microsoft released the RTM (Ready To Manufacture) of Windows Vista. This new operating system (which was delayed numerous times, and stripped of intended innovations like WinFS, and Windows PowerShell) is supposed to be the next best thing that could happen to you. Well, I have to see that for myself first. I played around with some beta’s in the last couple of months, and I can’t say that I’m impressed. But maybe, the RTM will surprise me.

Today I stumbled onto a leaked RTM iso file on the Internet which holds all versions of Vista (both 32bit and 64bit versions). This means that I could test all versions of the OS. With no valid license key it’s possible to evaluate Vista for 30 (or 60) days, so I will start to evaluate within the next couple of days, and see for myself if there’s any need in upgrading my Windows XP Professional PC to Vista.

I’ll keep you posted on the evaluation.

UPDATE: I installed Vista in Parallels on my Mac Book Pro. The installation took about 30 minutes, which surprised me a little. I choose the Ultimate Edition of Vista, which is supposed to be the most expensive version of Windows Vista.

Within Parallels, you have the possibility of installing the Parallels tools. They enhance the user experience of the virtual machine, and install the appropriate drivers for video and the network adapter. After installing the tools Vista isn’t able to shut the OS down properly. After selecting ‘Shutdown’, the virtual machine crashed. Same thing happened on earlier beta versions of Vista. This means that an Parallels update for this ‘Vista’ issue is imminent. Apart from that it seems to work fine. Perhaps, I should try VMWare as well as a testing environment. Too bad that VMWare doesn’t work on my Mac Book Pro

If all goes well, I’m able to get an official MSDN-key for Vista later next week. Let’s see if this version will accept the key, so that I’m able to experiment a little longer than the initial 30 days.