February 4th, 2009

Windows 7 Versions for Dummies

People are already complaining about the six versions of Windows 7 that Microsoft will release. They should be reminded that Vista had the same number as did XP (Embedded, Starter, Home, Media Center, Tablet PC, Professional, Professional Corporate). The editions are Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

Windows 7 employees a scheme more like XP originally was, either you’ll use Home Premium or Professional (Professional inherits all the features of Home Premium, unlike Vista Business). In Vista, not all of Home Premium’s features made it into Business edition, which left all users that wanted the Media Center features and Active Directory support with the overpriced Ultimate edition. Windows 7 Ultimate is more or less a non VLK version of Enterprise plus the Media Center features (I suspect the Media Center stuff will not be there in Enterprise despite claims of the contrary by others). End users in developed countries will never see Windows 7 Starter or Home Basic, and in most cases Enterprise.

Here’s a nice decision flow chart for those who are confused (and live in a developed country (e.g., USA, Canada, UK, Japan, etc.)):

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

January 30th, 2009

Installing WPN111 on Windows 7 Beta

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

They say it can not be done. I am here to prove them wrong. That is correct, you can run the Netgear WPN111 USB 802.11b/g card in Windows 7. It’s a little cumbersome, but possible. Here is how you do it. Note that you can leave the USB adapter plugged in during the entire process (that is what I did).

First, grab the latest WPN111 drivers from Netgear’s website. Then, right click and select “Run as administrator”. Continue on through the prompts, when it gets to the point of setting up networks use Task Manager to kill the installer. If you do not kill the installer, the finding networks portion will fail, causing it to automagically uninstall itself.

Now, open up device manager (right click on “Computer” select “Properties” and on the left sidebar click “Device Manage”). Under “Other devices” your WPN111 should show up with a nice warning sign. Select it, and right click, select “Update Driver”. Now select the “Browse my computer for driver software” option. Search in the location “C:\Program Files\NETGEAR\WPN111\Driver” for 32bit Windows and “C:\Program Files (x86)\NETGEAR\WPN111\Driver” for 64bit Windows. Then press “Next” if everything goes correctly, near your clock the WiFi signal icon will show up.

This method was tested on a 64bit install of Windows 7 Beta 1. It should work on 32bit installs as well. Though it seems to work, a few words of advice. First off, do not use WEP, instead use WPA or WPA2. I was unable to get WEP to work on this particular card in Windows 7. Also note a Netgear prompt may show up on startup, do press “Accept” and then tell it you want to use the “XP” wireless manager. If you fail to do this you will have to redo the driver installation.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

May 8th, 2007

Gentoo and an Aptana Howto

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

Well yesterday, both Gentoo 2007.0 and Aptana milestone 8 were released. Thanks to some bugs in a previous release I was able to test milestone 8 on Gentoo last week; that was before ATI’s drivers went kamikaze.

Overall I am impressed with milestone 8, it features more advanced support of PHP, including variable highlighting. With Gentoo to install Aptana just make a folder in /usr/lib called aptana, then extract the archive to that point. After that make a file in /usr/bin called aptana, open it in your favorite editor (nano) and add the following:
#!/bin/sh export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox exec /usr/lib/aptana/Aptana
Save the file and do a chmod 755 on it so that it becomes executable. Now try typing in the command aptana& into your terminal. If all goes right you should see the aptana splash screen. If you get a bug, look at the log file it directs you to. Should you see something like org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)] then your mozilla path is not correct. If the executable fails in general, you need to make sure you have the JRE 1.5 or newer. To get this just run emerge -p sun-jre-bin (you don’t have to use Sun’s JRE but that is what I use) if you like what you see then rerun the command without the -p. Once portage finishes doing its stuff, try executing Aptana again. It should work then, if not search the Aptana forums.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]