HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

I believe most here have already read about Google starting up an operating system of their own, Chrome OS to compete with Windows as their next project. I’ll share some of my feelings about good, bad and the futile related to this hopefully neat project.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Google want’s to provide users with an OS that boots up lightning fast and ready for web in seconds from switching power on. They want the system not to clutter up but always run as fast as anew. They want to provide an OS where there is no fuss and fighting with new hardware, configuring the system (that usually needs knowledge below the average) and no updates that break things or change&confuse the user interface. This all sounds good - and it also already sound familiar.

Gathered not from Chrome OS official blog but from a zdnet blog entry, let’s check some known facts:

• It runs on top of Linux kernel.
• It will boot directly into the Chrome Web browser
• It will be aimed primarily at netbooks
• It will run on both x86 and ARM processors
• It will not be designed to have local storage; all data will be stored in the cloud
• Google will not entice developers to build software to run on the Chrome OS; instead, they want them to build Web apps that will run on any standards-based browser
• The three most important features will be “speed, simplicity and security”, according to Google
• Google will release the software to the open source community before the end of 2009
• Announced Chrome OS hardware partners: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.
• Netbooks running Chrome OS will be available in the second half of 2010

(more…)

Ok, first off I don’t usually write about Windows OS specifically and do not use it, nor have I even tested Windows 7 myself. That being said I decided that since this is a big issue for some I should make one of my exceptions.

If you are using Windows 7 beta then you know (at least you should) that it expires tomorrow (July 1, 2009) and after that it will annoyingly shut down your computer every two hours. Other than that it will function untill August 1, 2009 when the beta will expire completely.

Next step is to either return to your old Windows version or install upgrade to RC. Unfortunately Microsoft does not officially support upgrading from beta to RC (they recommend clean install) - however browsing the web I bumped into this guide at tomshardware.com that tells you how to do the upgrade (and if nothing goes wrong save you from the trouble of re-installing everything): Windows 7 Beta Begins to Expire July 1, 2009.
If you don’t want to read what tomshardware has to say about this, to just skip right into upgrade procedure guide go straight to Microsofts own document, “Delivering a quality upgrade experience” on their Engineering Windows 7 blog.

I just thought that it might be polite to post this here, just in case that some reader is in this particular situation, pondering how to upgrade his expiring Windows 7 beta (even if it’s just running on top of Linux+VirtualBox ;) ), so there.

P.S. Don’t expect that I will take a habit of writing about Windows, because I rarely will. Sometimes but rarely, as I see it this is mostly *nix (and specifically Linux) use and programming related blog :)

On the right is one of the wallpapers I found on Bablotech blogs article 12 Wallpapers in which linux criticizes windows. While I personally have little use for wallpapers, beeing user of Ion3 Window manager, I know that many visitors here might find these amusing :)

No, I’m not using Windows on my own computer but at work I’m facing this issue right now:

Drive letter C: was very low on space and I noticed that there was a huge swap set in there while on D: there was plenty of more room. So I decided to disable swap on C: and enable swap on D: and let the system decide the swap size. It was not that big of a surprise that Windows was not capable to enable these changes without rebooting - after all, it’s still lousy system on updating it’s settings on fly.

What bugs the damn out of me that it did not give me the regular “reboot now?” window that I could just dismiss but a one with a moving bar - and it would have automatically rebooted after the bar had gone full if I had not pressed “reboot later” button.
Now I dont know what kind of stupid idiot monkey came up with the idea of serving the user with automagical reboot so that he don’t have to bother himself about it but rather be glad after coming from cup of coffee and having suddenly lost all the open programs and unsaved work there was still at the moment!!

It does not end here! The stupid monkey decided that it would be nice to repeat the popup after a while… Supposedly in case that the user would have gone to have a cup of coffee and the system could sneak itself to reboot without the user having a chance to tell it not to! It’s not that there is any critical reason to hurry the reboot - the system keeps working with the old setting until I (or windows) decides to reboot but apparently someone thought that this would really be a great feature giving a fullfilling user-experience (oh, it certainly would if it rebooted while I was having coffee).

…and people say that windows does not suck? Come now, a real system does not need a reboot to change swap settings around as much as you might want, let alone go clowning around this way. Microsoft, WTF!?