If you want to install Windows XP on your Gateway MT3418 laptop instead of Vista, you can use the drivers from the Gateway MX3417 laptop.  They’re the same machines, only the MT3418 came with Vista and the MX3714 came with XP.   I successfully installed the MX3417 drivers on my MT3418, and XP is running smoothly.

Here’s a link to the driver page on Gateway’s site.

So I was messing around with the partitions on my laptop the other day trying to install the new version of Ubuntu (7.10, which for some reason refused to run on my laptop) and managed to break whatever it is that tells XP to boot. I kept getting the error “Invalid Device Requested” when selecting XP in Grub. I checked the Grub entry in menu.lst, and checked the partition that XP was installed on, and it looked fine.

Then I realized that I had deleted the first partition on my HD to put the new Ubuntu on…and that partition, while not my Windows XP partition, was an NTFS partition that was some kind of backup/restore partition that Gateway had on there. I think it must have had all the Windows XP boot files on it, because when I looked that my XP partition, it was missing boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect, etc. That would explain why Grub was not seeing it as a bootable disk.

So I read a bit on the intarweb, and saw that a few people were saying that XP’s boot files need to be on the first partition of the disk. I’m not entirely sure that this is true, but to be safe I moved my XP partition to be the first on the disk.  EDIT: I’m not sure if XP has to be the first partition, and if someone else is having this same problem, try sticking the partition number with XP on it into the boot.ini file where it says “partition(1)”. Might save you some time.

I then made a new boot.ini with the following entries (pretty much default):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

I then copied the AUTOEXEC.bat, CONFIG.sys, IO.sys, MSDOS.sys, NTDETECT.com, and ntldr from another XP machine to the root of my laptop’s XP partition. I rebooted, and voila! XP booted right up from Grub. (You can also get these files off of the XP CD in the i386 folder.) EDIT: After doing some research, all you *should* need to fix this is NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and a BOOT.ini file.

Post a comment if this works for you.

This is for all you Wordpress people who use the WP-Shortstat plug-in to monitor your visitor stats.

Yesterday I got fed up with seeing all the search engine crawler/bot traffic on my stats page, so I fiddled around with the WP-ShortStat plugin and modified the SQL scripts to filter out search engine crawlers and bots.  The data will still be logged in the SQL table, but it just won’t show up on the stats page.

You can download my modified version here: wp-shortstat-modified.zip

It’s been nearly half a year since I installed Ubuntu, and my experience with it thus far has been interesting. There are some things I don’t like about, and there are some that I love. I’m going to go over a few of the highlights of my post-install experience.

Gripes

I really despise kernel updates. There are two reasons. The first is that every time I install a kernel update, GRUB gets overwritten and I have to remake my menu.lst to be able to boot to Windows XP. I’ve since gotten wise and backed it up, but still an annoyance. The other thing is that ALSA does not yet officially support my sound card, so I have to use the nightly builds of ALSA for my sound to work. When I install an update, I have to rebuild the drivers and install them again. It’s a bit of a pain.

For some reason, Ubuntu wants to run a disk check on one of my partitions every other time I start the computer. Not a big deal, but it’s annoying.

Sometimes Ubuntu seems to get stuck when I boot because it’s waiting for the wireless connection to establish. I believe what happens is that occasionally the access point doesn’t want to give my laptop an IP and it just takes forever to boot.

For some reason that I have not been able to figure out, Firefox freezes up after I watch a flash movie.  A bit of googling shows that this is a common problem that MIGHT have something to do with Nvidia’s video drivers.  Also, Firefox seems to stall/freeze for no reason sometimes.

Sometimes the Screenlets program decides that it wants to keep all of its windows on top of everything else, despite being set to be kept below. I have to go through and uncheck/recheck the keep below option on each open Screenlet.

Occasionally my machine will not power down completely. It acts like it’s turned off, but the power light stays on. It didn’t do that when I had Vista on it.

For some reason, when I try to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10, my machine won’t boot unless I disable ACPI in GRUB. When I do that, the function keys on my keyboard cease to function. The funny thing then is that my brightness keys DO work in 7.10 with ACPI off, but they don’t in 7.04. Can’t have everything I guess. (I switched back to 7.04)

My brightness keys still don’t work.

The Nvidia control panel is confusing.

Evolution and Thunderbird look like crap compared to MS Outlook.

And my last complaint: a lack of good games. Maybe I’m just picky, but I’d like some good arcade style games…like the kind of stuff Ambrosia Software puts out. Something with decent graphics that also doesn’t need a lot of CPU to run. A Bejeweled clone would be great, too. (I couldn’t get it to run under Wine.)

Glee

Compiz-Fusion RULES! My computing experience feels incomplete without my beloved wobbly, elastic windows. I can’t count the number of times during the day when I’m at work using XP and I try to pull down the corner of the browser window to see the weather screenlet and nothing happens…because Windows XP has no Compiz. It makes me sad.

Bash kicks the crap out of the Windows command line. Then it goes, takes a rest, and comes back and kicks the crap out of the Windows command line some more. It’s actually a lot faster to type “sudo rm -r [protected directory]” in Ubuntu than deleting a protected directory in Vista and having to deal with the UAC prompts. I’ve noticed that I barely use the GUI to browse directories anymore in Ubuntu. The command line is just so much faster.

Speaking of the command line, I love Aptitude. Especially after I found out that you can tab-complete package names. Very handy. Also, it’s SO MUCH FASTER (seems to be a trend when comparing Ubuntu to Windows) at installing and removing programs than the Windows Installer. Sure Apt is text based, but once you get the hang of it you realize how great of a tool it is.

gEdit is a wondrous text editor compared to Notepad.

I have yet to have gotten a virus or piece of ad-ware in Ubuntu. No need for anti-virus software to slow things down.

When I’m using Windows XP on this laptop, the screen goes crazy if I let the machine go into powersaving mode. This does not happen in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has a great driver for the Synaptics touchpad. It offers a lot more control than the Windows drivers, such as the ability to use two-finger and three-finger clicks. This was something that the MacBooks touted as a feature, but I’m pretty sure that it has more to do with the drivers than some special Apple hardware…since my laptop is able to do the same thing.

It is stable. I’ve had nowhere near the problems with Ubuntu that I had with Vista.

It’s FAST.

Conclusion

Ubuntu has it’s problems, but overall it’s a great operating system for the computer enthusiast who’s looking for something new and fun. I like it, and I look forward to the next release (hopefully it will run on my laptop). And if anyone who reads this has any ideas about any of the problems I mentioned, please leave a comment.

Earlier this year I purchased a Gateway laptop (Gateway MT3418) with Windows Vista on it. It was not long before I realized that my laptop was just not powerful enough to run an OS as bloated as Vista. Everything opened slow and ran slow, and the glitzy Aero window decorator simply was more than the laptop could handle. Aside from performance, Vista also was extremely buggy. Coming out of Hibernation and Sleep would cause my laptop to bluescreen. Copying files over the network from my desktop computer took forever, and the speed seemed to max out at 600Kb/s (over a 54mb connection). File operations like Copy and Move also took forever, and Vista often got stuck on “Calculating” during the process. It wasn’t long before I decided to do away with Vista.

Rather than purchase a copy of Windows XP, I decided to remove Vista and put a Linux distribution on my laptop (you can’t argue with the price…free!). I had tried several before, and I had the best experience with Ubuntu Linux. So I went and got the latest ISO, burned it to a CD, put it in my laptop, and booted up. The first thing I liked was that the install process was much better than anything I had experienced with Windows. When you boot from a Ubuntu install disk, it takes you straight to the desktop as though you had booted from a fresh installed of Ubuntu. From there, you can install Ubuntu to your hard drive. You can also, if you’re network card is detected correctly, surf the internet with Firefox WHILE the system is installing. That concept just about blew my mind. As for the installation process itself, it went very smoothly, and unlike Windows, there was no annoying license key to type in.

The install took about 10 minutes, after which I took the cd out and rebooted. After a fairly quick boot-up sequence, I was on my desktop. Everything looked pretty good. Ubuntu had chosen the correct video driver and screen resolution, which can occasionally be a problem with Linux distributions. The default installation had just about everything I would need to get going. There was a full office suite (OpenOffice), the Firefox web browser, Evolution email (similar to MS Outlook), and quite a few other applications that you would expect to find in a desktop operating system.

There were two major problems, however, that I noticed right away. First off, I had no sound. It took a little bit of research to discover that the sound chipset that my laptop used was not supported yet. However, after about three days of searching on Google, I found a patch for ALSA that had been posted on a bug report that fixed the issue.  (EDIT:  The card is now supported in the current release of ALSA.) Second, my wireless connection was not working. Ubuntu did not have drivers for the wireless card, which was a “RealTek 8185 Extensible Wireless Device”. I had heard about a program called NdisWrapper that would allow one to use Windows XP drivers for Linux. In my case, all I had was Windows Vista drivers, which supposedly were not supported yet. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying, so I installed NdisWrapper and used the RealTek drivers from Vista. Wondrously, it worked! So, after a few days of tinkering around, I had a fully functional laptop running Ubuntu Linux. (Well, there is one more problem, but it’s rather minor. More on that later.)

Given the fact that it took me three days to actually get some of the more important devices on my laptop to work, I could easily see how a more novice computer user could get frustrated rather quickly with a Linux installation, especially on a machine with newer hardware. A lot of the older and more popular hardware works well, but the support for newer and less widespread hardware is not. This isn’t necessarily a problem with Ubuntu or the open source community that codes for it, so much as it is a problem that hardware vendors do not (yet) see the need to make drivers for an operating system that has a limited user base. Of course, this creates a catch 22 of sorts. Hardware manufactures don’t create drivers for Ubuntu/Linux due to the small number of users, and Ubuntu has difficulty drawing new users due to lack of hardware support.

Back to my Ubuntu experience. After getting everything working properly, I turned to one of the more unique aspects of Ubuntu: user interface customization. When it comes to being able to customize the look and feel of your computer, Ubuntu (and Linux and general) is king. The Mac OS and Microsoft Windows simply cannot compare. Quite literally, any aspect of your desktop can be modified and customized in Ubuntu. Also, the look and feel of windows, buttons and menus can be changed as well. Also, there have been some advances with “3D Desktops” and Desktop Effects in Ubuntu, mainly through programs called “Compiz” and “Beryl”. For a sample of what these two programs can do, see this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_ImW0-MgR8I

I was blow away the first time I tried Beryl on my laptop. It was simply amazing the amount of animation and effects that my machine was rendering without any sort or slowdown or lag. It was even more amazing, because the Aero effects in Windows Vista had brought my laptop to it’s knees. Which was rather sad, because all that Aero did was add transparency to title bars and drop shadows behind windows and menus…nothing that should have taken a lot of processing power. Ubuntu with Beryl accomplished this and much more.

If I get the time later, I may post some screen shots.