My first impression of Windows 7 was good. Coming from a Windows XP environment, W7 proves to be a refreshing change in terms of speed and looks. Perhaps this is really not a fair comparison. The aging XP was really quite bloated with all the softwares I installed. Being an easily infested little weakling, XP had to fortify itself with an antivirus and a strong firewall. That I think, contributed to its comparatively slow startup.

Enter Window 7. Microsoft promised that W7 will load faster, more secure, and at the same time, look sexier. There has been a lot of good reviews about W7, and naturally I was tempted to try it out. I finally had the chance to do it last week. Formatted XP and replaced the damn machine with Windows7. Even the installation process was a breeze compared to the old XP days. Only a minor hiccup occured, otherwise the installation went without a hitch.

And I do have to agree, Windows 7 delivers! The startup time has been greatly reduced compared to XP. It still requires an antivirus though, but there are a lot of good antivirus out there, some even free. I used Avast, a good (free) antivirus software that protected my previous XP from a lot of possible damage. It updates almost everyday too, keeping the virus threat to a minimum. The only thing close to annoying is its sound; every time it updates itself, it goes “Virus database has been updated”! Scared the hell out of me especially on a quiet night! But that can easily be taken care of.

Windows 7 still requires some learning curve. I have not yet fully explored its features, such as the proper sanction of each different users in the machine. For example, I installed Google Chrome as the administrator, but I cannot apply Chrome as the system-wide default browser. It only affects the account where you are logged in as. So if you use another account, that account will have to do its own installation of Chrome. Not a show-stopper, but I guess this is a good security feature. These and a lot of other features will need a little getting used to.

Just when I thought my machine couldn’t get any faster, the latest reincarnation of the ever famous Ubuntu blew it out of the waters! The speed is like nothing I have ever seen on my machine, PERIOD! I do not have the data to back my claim, but I can say that it is at least about 5 seconds faster than W7! And that is blazing fast! Being an avid Ubuntu fan, the interface pose no challenge to me. I can easily find my ways in Ubuntu like a fish to waters. Perhaps the speed was due to the fact that I used ext4 as the file system for the boot and root.

Karmic Koala does not promise to revolutionize Ubuntu. Karmic Koala only have very basic promise, to speed up its loading time. And Ubuntu delivers on its already very usable and stable platform. Of course, I still find myself dual-booting back to W7 for Photoshop and Canon’s DPP. But for all my everyday use, Karmic Koala will rise to the challenge, and in good speed too!

Stupid beast this MBR (master boot record) is from Windows. Even in its 7th reincarnation, MBR still bugs me. I am not a big fan of Windows, but I still find myself going back to Windows. And Windows 7 looks more attractive and sexier than XP by a mile!

Anyway why do I bother about MBR? That’s because my harddisk has always been loading Ubuntu mainly, Windows secondary. Being the primary OS, Ubuntu assigned GRUB as the boot loader. Things get ugly when I switch back to Windows, as you shall see why.

In order to reformat my dual-booting machine, I first have to install the secondary OS, in this case Windows. Then only can I install Ubuntu, so that Ubuntu can manage the booting itself. Besides, the Windows installation is too stupid, it cannot detect other existing OS’es to co-exist peacefully with others. Typical Microsoft.

So my MBR is destroyed. No matter how many times I install Windows, it just will not load from the hard disk. Took me a lot of googling before I found out this MBR thingy. And how it differs from previous Windows XP! Previous XP still uses fixmbr.exe to solve this. Not since Vista. Vista and Windows 7 uses bootrec.exe instead. (There is another similar command, called bootsect.exe, but that does not work. Google it!)

The first step is to load your machine with the Windows 7 installer disk. Select the language, keyboard language and country and click next. Select “Repair Your Computer”. It will scan your machine for any existing operating system. Select the Windows installation located in your local hard disk (in my case Windows 7) and click Next. In the System Recovery Option Dialog box, select Command Prompt.

Here you will be prompted with a command prompt, old school style. Type “bootrec /?” and press enter. If you followed the steps correctly, you should be able to see a set of possible options. At first, I chose “bootrec /FixMbr“, restarted the machine, but it does not work. So I loaded the installer again, go through the same steps again, this time choosing “bootrec /FixBoot“. Then after restarting the machine, VIOLA! It worked!

Lucky I have another machine that can go online while I do this. Otherwise, I’d be dead!

Arrghhhhh!! This happens rather frequently, caused by the release of a better and more bug-free Linux kernel. This is a good thing actually, but its side effect is exactly what this post is trying to solve. Your boot partition grows, and the next thing you know, you can’t upgrade to a newer version of the kernel anymore!

Good thing about the internet is that you can find almost any information you want. I can always find the solution anytime, but I am lazy. This post is more a reminder to myself rather than another explanation to what is happening.

First you go to a command screen and type this line:

uname -r

This will tell you what your current kernel version that you are using. Note that.

Next go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

Search for linux-image-2 in the search box.

The list might get a bit confusing. I’m confused. So what I’ll do is to type this at the command line instead:

gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

This corresponds to the list that you see when you boot up your computer. Now you know what to remove. It’s a good idea to only remove all but the last two previous good versions of the kernel, just in case. But it’s up to your own comfort level anyway.

Note that it is not necessary to remove the entries in menu.lst, that was why I did not include sudo in the command. Once you remove the values in synaptic, the values in menu.lst will be removed anyway.

I give up. I can’t seem to find back XMMS in Hardy. But this is Linux world, everything is available, you just have to look harder. I bumped into Audacious, and it looks like a good XMMS replacement. Contrary to what everybody thinks, XMMS2 is NOT a replacement for XMMS. It’s actually a command line MP3 player, with no GUI! (Yeah, Linux is that eccentric, you do not need to click a mouse to play music, you type commands!)

So yeah, Audacious it is. The interface looks clean and smooth, it auto updates itself (because it’s in the repositories) and most importantly, it plays my music with clicks instead of types!

Photo captured with Screenshot, edited with GIMP.