Which OS Poll Results

I had been running this for quite a while and this is the final result before I put it offline:

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is released!

Grab it at:
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Acronis should not be used to create and format drive for Windows Vista and Vista 7

I know this sound funny, lets go back to where it all begins.

First, I got hold of a vanilla machine which comes with the default vendors OS plus one HDD with 1 partition. OK, not entirely true, the OS was downgraded from Vista to XP and the vendor actually have a recovery partition in addition to the normal OS partition. So, if you know me enough, I would love to have Windows 7 on this. And I may not want to kill the original OS. And to make things worth, in this environment, its not OK to burn CD/DVD or use a USB device.

Firstly, we got to make another partition for the new OS. So a few tools comes into my mind. Hiren. Nope, its a boot disc. OK, so we need one that can either work inline or via a reboot shell. Acronis Disk Director 10 was available. So here we have. I reboot and resize the parition and make a new partition for the new OS. The critical mistake I made was I created and formatted the new partition in Acronis. Fatal.

But there were no tell tale sign that something was wrong. Windows 7 can be installed without extracting the files. Just mount the ISO with Alcohol or Daemon Tool, then install to the new partition. Everything went smoothly. Until I started to use Windows 7 and many application starts to give warning error about corruption. One such message came from Live Messenger "MSNMSGR.EXE - File Corrupt". Using chkdsk /f, I manage to find lots of MFT and BITMAP errors. I thought fixing it with solve all the problem. After some reboot, more usage, the error came back again and again. I just could figure out what went wrong.

Now, lets take a look at this thread:
http://board.iexbeta.com/lofiversion/index.php/t63381.html

It seems that such problem exist as far as 2006 and these folk found the answer in 2008. And after 2 years later, I splatter all over the wall with this issue. After some chkdsk /r and reinstall, repair startup option etc, I final found the problem. It is Acronis. Apparently, it create a non-standard partition which create problem for newer OS such as Vista and Windows 7. To fix this, I will have to lose my new partition by removing it, then delete the partition and have Windows Disk Manager to recreate the partition. Everything went smoothly after which.

Although Acronis Disk Director was released in 2007, I believe Microsoft and Acronis should issue a incompatibility warning for this. It could had save me lots of time. I guess both parties probably at some point of time point fingers and did not want to highlight this problem, but I just hope no one else have to hard the wall so I posted this here.

Windows 7 launches in Singapore at $77

For the first 177 buyer anyway. It is the Home Premium upgrade version.
Read more at:
http://www.yourpcsimplified.com/events.aspx

But I am sure some of you already got it for months. So its nothing new.

5 New OS from Microsoft

With Windows 7 on the blink of release (its actually RTM...), Microsoft actually has 5 new OS up their sleeves:

1. Windows 8 (Windows 7 Successor)
2. Windows Midori (Written entirely in managed code)
3. Windows Singularity (Basically the same as Windows Midori)
4. Windows Azure (Cloud Computing OS)
5. Barrelfish (Multicore OS)

Windows 8 being the biggest hype. With a new filesystem and totally gone with Windows Explorer, is Windows 8 what we had been waiting for? Btw, there are already lots of fake alpha on torrent site. ALL fake. I doubt any Windows 8 alpha will be out soon since its schedule for 2011. Yes, thats a bit too fast to phase out Windows 7. But well, there are companies still using Windows XP...

Install Fedora 10 on Virtual PC 2007 SP1

The graphics mode pretty much does not work, at least for me. The whole installation was done in Text mode. This is weird because I remembered I managed to get it working in Fedora 9. In any case, to make the WORST happens, I installed everything, which WAS a mistake. The sensible thing to do is to NOT select virtualization. The reason being it doesnt help much in a already virtualized environment. Unless someone has a paper which prove me wrong about VoV (Virtualization on Virtualization).

Ok, I will only flag out the hard part, the rest is standard protocol. 

For the file system, it may make sense to use a normal non-RAID partition because in the VM, there should not be any performance improvement (or rather its probably going to cause performance issue). So, what I did was a simple 1 x swap and 1 x ext3 partition. If you free you want to secure your /boot, you can split that out too.

The rest goes as per normal. After the reboot, you will realized you see nothing (or some garbage) on the screen and cannot see anything. To fix this, you have to get into grub menu. Edit the kernel... line adding "vga=0x32D" at the end. That should allow you to boot up into text mode at least.

Now once you are in text mode, you will want to fix this once and for all. Go to /boot/grub and change the menu.lst according with the vga=0x32D on the line.

You will also notice the screen is huge and its not very friendly for some of us using a laptop with tiny screen. To fix that, you will need internet to install some modules. Once you confirm that internet is up, do :

yum install system-config-display

and then after the installation, run :

system-config-display --reconfigure

You X should now run properly in whichever resolution your choose. The rest, should be easy.

Windows Vista SP1 RC

Yes, with Office 2007 beinglaunched, here comes Vista SP1. However, this is still RC as like Windows Server 2008. So the final is expected to have some changes perhaps.

Download using Windows Update at :
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9de6260e-4275-482d-9524-de850c4dd91c&DisplayLang=en

Or get the whole Standalone CD for all languages at :
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/3/c/b3cf192f-7f49-4da7-a740-07818dc8c7aa/Windows6.0-KB936330-wave0-X86.exe

Big Bank Teller Machine on New Technology

Yes. No joke. Anyway Windows NT was Windows New Technology in case you did not know. Yes, banks still use them. Many reasons may be behind this. It could be due to the software that they used / developed has these legacy roots in those old OS. BTW, should this teller at least have used WinNT server instead of WinNT Workstation?

But if the bank continue to use Windows NT? What danger does it pose?

As you can see in this screen, the teller machine rebooted. Stability is definitely at risk. Moreover, as far as WinNT is concerned, Microsoft has stopped supporting this OS.

Beginning January 1, 2005, Pay-per-incident and Premier support will no longer be available. This includes security hotfixes. As of January 1, 2005 (or later), online support will no longer be available.

Microsoft Web Site

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/winntas/ntendlife.mspx?mfr=true

This would mean that security fixes will stop, along with any bugs be it major or minor. If the bank continue to use this, this sigificantly put the bank at risk.

As a consumer, do we have a say about this? I had yet thought of the answer. We can pressure the bank to upgrade their software and OS. Its our data that is at risk and at least we have the rights to make a official remark/ complain about this.

I will put mine letter up once I have time to write it.