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A linux guy's experience with Windows 7

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:58:05 GMT

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am typically somewhat of an anti-Windows guy. I absolutely love linux, and get very frustrated by Windows in general. The only thing that I really dislike about linux is the lack of application support by a number of companies (ahem.... Adobe). Before going to the Adobe MAX conference, I decided I should swap out OSes on my personal laptop so that I could run all the stuff I would need for labs without constantly cursing about being stuck in a VM, limited functionality, etc. A friend had just bought a package of Windows 7 licenses and sold me one for 5 bucks, which I considered to be a pretty reasonable risk. I opted for installing Windows 7 on my laptop.

Given that background and my previous feelings about Windows, I have to say that it is a pretty dang nice operating system. It is by far the best offering to date by MS in my opinion. There are a few things that they still haven't managed to get right (native file copy still makes me want to stick forks in my eyes), but by and large they have done a great job with Windows 7. Other than having to track down a few drivers for my laptop, the installation was painless - if not fast. This is still an area that linux, and especially Ubuntu, wins hands down though. Apps run extremely stable, and with the addition of a new concept of "Libraries", directories that I need access to regularly are right at hand instead of having to tree down through big hierarchies. I am also not finding what I expected would be an immediate degradation of performance after installing all the servers and development tools that I use on a daily basis. Over all, so far so good.

A few things that I think are a *must* for the way that I use it.

I found a "sudo" program called Start++ that allows me to open applications from the terminal or start menu as Administrator by typing sudo notepad [or some other program]. It will prompt you for the UAC stuff and the program will open as administrator. I use this regularly for editing system files like hosts, apache configs, and use it to open a terminal to fire off j2ee servers.
Install Teracopy which is a replacement for the Windows copy program. While certainly not as fast/efficient as a linux terminal, it greatly increases file copy speed over the native windows GUI file copy. No more "preparing to copy" waits while your system bogs down.

Things that annoy me

I still wish I could have a real terminal and be able to use VI in sudo, but that is just something I will have to get over I guess.
I hate that I now have to be so careful with regard to viruses and spyware. I love the protection that linux offers in that area, and having to go out of my to stay protected seems a bit cumbersome.
I miss being able to easily try out software with the ease of the synaptic package manager. It seems foreign now to have to download an exe run an installer and have settings being obscurely written all over a "black box" registry.
I miss built-in networking tools. Even simply things like being able to run "whois" from the teminal.
My drive is getting fragmented far faster than with linux, and I find that I am running the defrag tool fairly often. Linux just manages this under the covers and I never have to worry about it.

All said, after using it for about the past 4 weeks, I can honestly say that I am surprised (and perhaps even a bit disappointed) that I like it as much as I do. I planned on just running it while I was at the Adobe MAX conference and going back to linux when I got home, but it looks like I will be keeping it for a while longer.

I recommend saying "format c: /q" near your new Vista machine

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:51:05 GMT

As reported by ZDnet, Microsoft has left a funny security hole in their new offering to the masses that allows an attacker - or just someone who is able to... you know...talk and stuff - to verbally execute commands through its speech recognition feature. One point that has been brought up is that someone could send an audio file that played the commands for your computer to follow. How about that! So for those of you who continue to use Windows and migrate to Vista, you might consider disabling leaving your microphone off unless you are actually using it. Also, before they get a patch out, you *have* to go play with it and let me know what you were able to actually do!

Here is the complete article which includes a confirmation response from Microsoft on the exploit.

Mounting drives in Windows... just like Linux!

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:13:59 GMT

Before continuing I must concede to the fact that I am *not* a fan of Windows. I use it where I have to, but by and large I feel that Linux, specifically Ubuntu, is just a more pleasant experience and is a better tool for the kind of jobs that *I* need a computer to do. I must also admit that I was Microsoft certified about 9 years ago (the NT4 track!), so what I "discovered" last night might not be entirely new to many people, but it was certainly new to me so I thought I would share. Plus, considering how rarely I have compliments for Windows, I feel obligated to share this so that my steadfast Microsoft fanboy friends will quit saying "Why do you hate Bill Gates?", which incidentally I do not.

Now that I have gotten that out, let me tell you about a cool feature I found within Windows last night. It actually does something the way that Linux does!

One of the Windows web servers that we interact with has its webroot on the D: drive, with a path D:\inetpub\wwwroot. At the time that this application was created, hard drives were not the size they are today and 8GB seemed like a reasonable partition for a data drive. However the application has grown, as has its need for hard drive consumption and it finally reached a level which needed to be addressed.

I originally set out to add a new drive (E:), then move the wwwroot over to the new drive, update all mappings in IIS, including virtual directories, and update any mappings within ColdFusion. This was not a very exciting prospect considering this is a live production server. However, this seemed like a fairly logical approach so I began.

First I added the new drive and initialized it in the Disk Manager. I now had this 80GB empty partition which I planned on turning into E: After choosing to to make it a "Primary Partition" and selecting the size, I got to the point for choosing the drive letter. This is where an option jumped out at me that I had never noticed before, which is a testament to both my lack of observance and to how fast I normally cruise through this section! I was presented with the following:

WHAT??? "Mount"???

The solution became abundantly clear immediately. Rather than have to re-map paths and risk blowing up whatever buried physical paths might lurk under the covers of this legacy application, I would simply mount the new drive as: d:\inetpub\wwwroot - just like Linux but with backwards slashes and the funny letter/colon thing on the front!

So, I renamed the existing wwwroot folder to wwwroot.old, mounted the drive to that position, and copied over all files from the old wwwroot to the new wwwroot. I restarted ColdFusion and IIS and the application picked up right where it had left off without a hitch!

So (get ready to write this down, because you won't hear it often from me).... YAY for Windows!

We have landed

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Well, I have installed my blogging software. Time to play. :)