If I get a chance this weekend or next, I plan on installing freeradius on my pfSense box to use it in conjunction with my wireless. Should be a fun thing to do.

After booting into Clean Boot mode, same error. My Vista drive has 1TB of space, with about 800GB free. But… my boot drive is the other TB drive with Fedora 12 on it, and obviously Windows can’t write to it. Seems a little brain-dead that Windows wouldn’t write temporary files to *it’s* primary drive, doesn’t it? Going into the BIOS to change the boot drive from Fedora to Windows did the trick. Isn’t this OS supposed to be intelligent though?

Otherwise the upgrade was uneventful… mind you, the only apps I have installed are NWN2, D&D Online, Firefox, and Cygwin so I guess there’s not a lot to mess up in there. Pretty uneventful.

And it totally looks like Vista. I guess the visual enhancements must be *really* subtle.

But, the whole thing is highly amusing. First, you have to look at the videos. These are priceless. I must know how much you get paid to look so dang happy showing people the marvels of an innovative “search” feature. Seriously, you need to check these out. I can’t say they’re good for a laugh… they’re not. But they’re certainly bewildering and bewitching… like… well, nothing comes to mind. But don’t watch the introductory video (well, if you must, go for it)… it’s long and I was almost crying by the end of it. Yeah, it’s that bad. Here it is: Windows 7 house party host help videos.

The reason why I post this isn’t to necessarily mock Microsoft. They’re doing a fine job of that themselves. But I wanted to point out an absolutely brilliant piece of journalism that was written because of these videos and is extremely amusing. (Thanks Maurice for posting the link on the ELUG list!). Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?.

I’ll forgive you if you don’t watch the videos. Only a morbid fascination had me watch three of them (and by then it was just so patently ridiculous I couldn’t justify spending another moment watching more), but this article is pure genius. Some of the comments are mighty amusing as well.

The first site has to be viewed from the Blackberry: www.themestorm.net/. I actually haven’t checked this one out. The second is a list on the crackberry forums. If you look at this list, there are a tonne of themes of available. I’ve only looked at the the Gears of War theme and some iBerry theme (supposed to make the Blackberry look like an iPhone I guess).

South Park Mac vs PC

South Park Mac vs PC vs Linux

OMG… YouTube is scary. You should check out this fellow trying to explain Why Linux is Better Than Windows. I think this guy wrote his script, drank a lot, and then made the video.

Oh, and he has trouble saying Mandriva. Is it really that hard?

hehe… I can’t stop laughing… Anyways, it frightens me just who is preaching Linux.. I’m not cure I’d buy anything from this guy.

Apparently Microsoft has determined that their users are complete morons, or they have received enough phone questions with the burning question: Just exactly *how* am I supposed to open this dang box?!?

The answer, my friends, is a click away on Microsoft’s Windows Help and How-to site: Opening the Windows Vista box. For those of you who need this sort of help, you have my permission to cry now. For those fortunate enough to not have to lay eyes on the Vista OS itself, or the incredibly difficult-to-open box it comes in, you may now grab a beer and rejoice.

My first impressions are this: the boot was extremely quiet. That’s ok, but I wasn’t sure what was happening at first. Then I get in, start poking around a bit, and decide to run their update utility. Says I have to run “apt-get install -f”. That’s a clear sign something is borked.

Sure enough, apt wants to remove all of GNOME. So I let it (it’s a vmware image, after all… no harm there). Ok, so now my install is ok, but I’m in GNOME in a gnome-terminal, and apparently all these programs are gone and I’d kinda like to have them back. Do you think apt tells me where the problem is? Nope. It keeps telling me about unmet dependencies until my “apt-get install gnome-core …” line is getting ridiculously long as I keep adding new packages. And then *finally* it tells me what’s wrong. Apparently “libsoup2.2-8″ is not available. It could have told me that right at the beginning. And people think RPM has dependency hell? Ummm… ok… this is apt, using (from what I can tell) deb packages, and clearly it has issues too.

I guess the appeal of Nexenta is… hmmm… I’m not really sure. It’s running GNOME. It’s brown. Looks an awful lot like Ubuntu. It’s not using all GNU tools. Heck, it’s not even using BSD tools. I mean, really, “ps ax” works on my mac and on my linux boxen. Does it work here? Nope. Gives me usage. The man page lies too. Oh, it talks all nice and sweet about using -a and -x, but there is no -x, and -a doesn’t give me all my processes, it gives me one process (and probably the most useless at that)… ps itself. How cool is that? So if you want to know how long it took to run your ps command, and what it’s pid was, use “ps -a”. The closest thing to “ps ax” that I can see is “ps -e”.

It uses GRUB. That’s kinda neat. No idea where the kernel is hiding.

Of course, these aren’t really comments against Nexenta, OpenSolaris, or Solaris/SunOS themselves… it’s largely my own ignorance, but why are they calling themselves “GNU/OpenSolaris” and not using better GNU tools? I mean, OS X uses the BSD ps and it’s more feature-rich than the SunOS ps. Nevermind the Linux ps.

Oh well. Again, I’m just ignorant of anything other than *BSD or Linux. It was interesting, and maybe I’ll try again once someone has a libsoup2.2-8 package for apt to install (not too keen on just plain old not having GNOME around anymore because then it would make for some fairly boring playing around).

So I have a friend’s machine here, for which I’m charging to repair, of course, that’s doing all kinds of funky things. I get some kind of sadistic pleasure in re-formatting these drives… but that’s dampened by the fact that I have to backup data and figure out a way to get it all back clean. That already proved an issue with Windows file-locking and the inability to copy files that are in use (how silly is that?).

Ah well.. for all you poor Windows suckers out there, may I offer a few words of advice? A Linksys firewall/router is really cheap… and offers way more protection than some software-based firewall (on Windows, of course). Buy one. Please. Also, if you need a virus scanner, don’t let Norton or McAffee gouge you with inferior products… use ClamWin which is a port of ClamAV for Windows. Not only is it free, but it works. For spyware, the only recommendation I have is get another OS. I’ve never looked at any of those solutions but if Ad-Aware is one of the “best” in that category, my brothers who are slaves to the Windows beast are in trouble.

Oh, and use Firefox and Thunderbird instead of Internet Explorer and Outlook.

Now I’m off to try to get some of this data back onto his machine and hopefully not lose any of it due to viruses or other malware (am I off my rocker or does ClamWin just report/delete/quarantine files? I thought virus scanners could clean files too or have they just given up on this?)

I’d love to but… in which an individual who’s been programming for 21+ years and says ‘This emulation mentality means that you are always working on implementing Microsoft’s latest offering while Microsoft is working hard on “the next big thing”.‘.

The next big thing? Like what? Let’s take a quick look at Vista and what it has to offer. Pretty much everything the OS X users have had since Tiger, if not Panther. But this video a friend sent me speaks louder than what I could say about it:

Windows Vista: First of a Kind Features?

and

Windows Vista: A Revolution in Information Access?

The videos are quite informative. And goes to show just how much Redmond “innovates”. Or, maybe they do innovate and they came up with all these ideas and someone within Microsoft has been leaking all of this to Apple who has the technical skills and expertise to deliver on the idea almost two years before Vistas’s projected end-of-2006 release date?

Nah….