Tag Archives: upgrade

Windows 7 RC expiration date

Personal,

I’ve been running Windows 7 since last June after downloading the release candidate and it’s been going well. Since then on the plus side Microsoft released the Security Essentials anti-viris product so no need for Norton, MacAfee, etc but on the down side the “release candidate” I’m using will expire soon. This is disapointing as I’m not to keen on forking over $299 for Win7 Professional. I have a XP Pro license but it’s not installed on anything so I’m hoping I can use the Win7 Pro upgrade with the XP Pro license from that CD. If so it will save me a $100. JOY !!!

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex beta

Technology, ,

With the latest release of Ubuntu coming up thought I’d give the beta a try for a few days. It served me well when moving from Gutsy to Hardy earlier in the year. The install was routine no problems and the only real changes were to manually partition the drive. By default /home is not on it’s own partition and doing that makes upgrades and backups a better experience.

After loading and logging in did the normal updates with apt-get and added a few apps like Geany, Bluefish, vpnc, Liferea, gFTP, irssi and some others. The latest version of GNOME has a modified network manager as well as some changes to user switching and logging off, obvious to me at least. You can see the complete list here.

Evolution also had some changes.

Message Templates
WebDAV Contacts support
Google Contacts support
Custom header support while sending mails 
Single Model view for Calendar
Sqlite Based message summary (aka Camel On-disk Summary)
New Bonobo-less composer for Evolution 
Quota support to IMAP/POP accounts
Gtk+ Recent manager integration in Composer
Contact-list for Exchange

I had some initial trouble with the conversion where the indexed messages didn’t match the db. But removing files in .evolution/mail/local leaving the mbox files fixed the problem.

So far no real show stoppers, until this morning when updating caused a firmware / driver mismatch with the wirless nic, ipw2200. Not to keen on digging into that at the moment so will go back to Hardy for now. More than likely another update in a few days will fix it or it will be resolved in general release.

Update: Oct. 20 – After further investigation the firmware was removed. Putting it back in /lib/firmware resolved.

Server upgrade

Personal,

Yesterday my host Dixie Internet Systems migrated the server this site is on to a new one. Unfortunately I didn’t catch it till late last night. They notified my on Firday about the details but I didn’t get to checking as soon as I should have. So it’s very possible some emails got rejected between 12:00pm and sometime early this morning. If that’s the case please resend emails to myself or Kay.

Everything is working again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2 weeks with the new box

Personal,

Well it’s been 2 weeks now with the new box and no Windows, a little different not using Windows for work but it hasn’t required any more effort. Some of the apps we used before for personal things, Quicken and iTunes, their are open source alternatives so we haven’t missed them yet. On the work side for the windows only apps I need, which are 2, they are on a server that can be accessed via tsclient. Their is one app I don’t have, Microsoft’s Communicator/Net Meeting, wihich is missed somewhat. We are not a company that traditionally communicates via chat so it’s use is still taking shape. I had hoped the web version was installed on the same server with the other apps but that is not the case. Maybe IT will get to that.

So far I’m pleased… except for the sound card taking a dive this morning. Lightning struck the power line outside the house which seems to have blown the integraded sound on the mobo. I never lost power and nothing else seems to have been affected so may have to scrounge a PCI one up. For these last 2 weeks I’ve also been using Evolution for mail, work and personal. I’ve switched back and forth between it and Thunderbird over the years but have never been able to stick with one or the other. It’s nice that both use mbox format for storing messages, makes copying that much easier. But I think it will be back to Thunderbird now and I’ll use the Lightning add on for Calendar functions.