I also eventually installed Ubuntu and Kubuntu because I wanted to see if I still hated it as much as I did previously.  For the most part, most things worked.  The main problem was that because it was set up so the Xorg server would determine the screen resolution, it would default to a quite small 640×480 screen.  VMware can resize its “screen size” so there is no actual default resolution that it will send other than a regular vga size screen.  At least this was easily fixed with RandR.  My next step was to install Debathena.  After all, this was the main reason I was willing to try Ubuntu again.  MIT SIPB all use Ubuntu and does not support the other distros very well.  On Ubuntu I ran into some troubles with it not resolving dependencies well, but for the most part it has worked on Kubuntu.  The last struggle I have is getting zephyr to work.  Currently it says it times out when trying to get a location.  Not sure what that means because a quick google search does not lead to any help about zephyr nor does the the documentation.  I have not tested that thoroughly yet, but most stuff seems to be working.

My problems include a variety of everything from general system lagginess (to be expected, but not this much) to sound skipping to everything still not working perfectly.  Overall on all of the systems, they’ve been slightly laggy when transitioning between my host OS and the guest OS, but once I’ve been inside the guest for a few seconds, the mouse works fine.  The keyboard lags and may occasionally drop keys or repeat one.  The sound has also been choppy on the systems.  I looked up suggestions to change sizes of some of the settings, but that didn’t help much.  My networking is still sometimes spotty and does not work as well as I would hope.  Maybe VMware will fix this in Windows 7 soon.

When emulating things, do not expect them to be as fast as they would be on their native hardware.  Be ready to wait in frustration.

Deep inside the Windows 7 Public Beta: an in-depth tour

I cleared my entire hard drive for Windows 7.  This means I removed my linux(es) and Vista partitions completely.  I wondered if I would regret my decision of not having linux running natively on my machine, but so far, Windows 7 has not disappointed (much).  The only problem so far has been getting internet working with VMware, but that has been partially solved.  I have also only had 1 BSoD so far.

Windows 7 as “Linux killer”? How times have changed!

Windows has finally released another good operating system, but that actually is pretty and I might use.  Everyone go get Windows 7 beta now, before the trial period closes.

Overall, I am fairly displeased with the number of problems in this version.  Many problems are probably because of incompatibilities in the config files from different versions.  So, since I need to clean my machine anyway.  I am going to nuke my entire machine and start fresh.  Install Vista with a smaller partition.  Install a clean OpenSUSE 11.1.  Leave some space for Gentoo.  Install VMware and install XP with hardware 3d acceleration so I can still play games like Age of Empires 2 which won’t run under Vista.

Nuke everything before trying new software.  Being clean is good.

I wake up and reboot the machine.  The first time I booted it hung for a while.  I thought it was just fsck-ing but I went from the pretty framebuffered screen to the terminal and saw it hung on something.  HAL (Hardware abstraction layer) crashed somewhere and was displaying a stack trace.  Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with this error (should have sent a bug error), and hit ctrl+c to get out of it and try to start the system.  At least it wasn’t a fatal kernel crash.  My /home wasn’t mounted so none of my settings could be loaded.  Ahh crap.  I already broke something.  I rebooted everything hoping somehow it would all be better.  It was.  Weird… two hiccups, I never had this before.

I boot up and everything is running smoothly.  KDE4 compositing is on and everything is pretty looking.  I try to get online and realize I’m not connected.  I try to connect to the wireless with knetworkmanager/kde3 but nothing happens.  Why doesn’t this work?!  Wireless was working fine on the live cd.  I eventually go into Yast again and change it so the network is not managed by networkmanager.  It works.  This could be a slight problem trying to connect to obscure wireless networks that I’m not familiar with.  For the moment it works.  I try to search around on the wiki about how it normally uses networkmanager but find nothing.  After a bit of searching, I find a widget for Networkmanager and try that.  I eventually get it to work after a few restarts and a few setting changes.  Maybe this is a remanant of having an old ~/.kde4.  Three hiccups.  This is a little disappointing, but at least I was able to get past them.  It is a slight disappointment how there are these small problems, but  I know it will be better.

The desktop itself is very pretty.  Compositing is enabled by default and my machine takes advantage of this.  Transparencies and rotating cubes and more eye candy everywhere.  I still love OpenSUSE even with the few problems I ran into.  My only disappointment is the networkmanager widget.  It is less straightforward than the kde3 version, but that version doesn’t work anymore as far as I can tell.  I have yet to test the suspend to disk/ram, but they should work.  Will report back when I do.  I still recommend OpenSUSE to everyone who wants a good linux distro.

New releases of software will have slight problems.  Work through them and everything will hopefully work.