Kids’ Doc in Jos

Well, here I am, still using Vista, three months after writing my blog entry about some of its frustrations. The frustrations are still there and I still consider scrapping the whole thing and loading XP. So why haven’t I done it yet? After all, I’ve already done a complete factory re-installation just to get back to a (semi)-stable system; why am I still struggling with Vista?

• Hassle: This laptop came with Vista installed, so if I install XP from scratch, I’ll have to find and install all the right drivers, and somehow obtain or live without the bundled software. Come to think of it, I’m using almost none of that software anyway, but Lenovo’s ThinkVantage utilities are sometimes handy. To switch to XP, I’d probably try to get Lenovo to send me an installation DVD, since I know they do or did sell this model with XP as an option (for an extra $100!).
• Features. Vista does have some nice features. Some, such as the search capabilities are actually user friendly. You can pretty much just type a word or two into the Explorer search box and get a list of files that match, instantly. Google Desktop does much the same thing, but the Vista version has its own advantages. Google Desktop kept crashing in Vista anyway ….. Reading Vista Toolkit, I am also learning about some of the fundamental improvements to the operating system which are not as visible, and I’m grudgingly convinced that the OS is probably superior, at least for systems with the resources to handle it. Of course, the book is written by Microsoft …
• Going with the flow. I think that sooner or later, I’ll have to switch to Vista along with everyone else [correction thanks to David, below: should be every other Windows user, since there are non-Windows alternatives]. Even now, it’s getting hard to find new laptops with XP pre-installed rather than Vista. It probably would have been better to wait another year or at least until the first service pack is public, but it’s what I have now.

I have, however, become a lot more cautious about loading up my new system. Within a few weeks of getting my brand new, fresh, laptop in December, I was getting so many program crashes and problems that I gave up and, as I said, reinstalled everything from scratch, going back to the factory-new state. This time, I am only slowly adding software.

Firefox is my favorite browser, but I haven’t installed it yet. My main photo editor doesn’t work right on Vista (unless I upgrade it), so I haven’t installed that, either. Ditto with Acrobat (the full version, not the reader). Before I install anything new, I make sure that the system has been running well for a couple of days. Then, if warranted, I make a backup or restore point. I keep a detailed log of everything I install, of each backup or system restore point I make, and of each significant problem.

There is one more key step, however, if you want to migrate to Vista and you have more than the most basic applications to migrate. After all, how can I cope when some applications don’t run, others crash, and I have to be slow and methodical about adding devices and programs?

The key is to run a virtual computer with XP, a virtual computer where I can install whatever I want that already runs in XP. A virtual computer is a program that runs on your “real” hardware computer, but acts like a separate, independent computer. There are many virtualization programs available, but I’m using the free (for personal use) VirtualBox by Innotek. I installed VirtualBox, then used it to create a virtual machine with a virtual hard drive. Then, it was easy to boot it with a Windows XP installation CD, go through the usual installation process and, presto, I have two computers in one. (See image, click for larger view. The XP machine is the main application running in the Vista desktop.)

Now, for example, when my scanner didn’t work in Vista, even with the new Vista-compatible drivers, I just installed it on the vbox XP system. End of problem. Of course, the virtual machine is theoretically a little slower than the “real” one, but it still runs faster than my 5-year-old laptop, and I don’t notice any performance problems.

Actually, I also cheat a little by keeping my old laptop running, since I know that everything more-or-less works on it.

There you have it, a piece of cake. If you want to eat your cake and have it too, go ahead and upgrade to Vista, but be sure to keep XP around one way or another. On the other hand, a friend tells me that most of his computer friends have dumped Vista and gone back to XP entirely, and I have to admit that this sounds like the simple road to follow.

Reading this again makes me wonder if I’m crazy … this is a lot of trouble to go through just to stick with Vista! On the other hand, how much trouble will I have trying to revert back to XP? (Yes, I can dual boot, adding even more complications …)

Since I needed a new computer, I left my old laptop in Nigeria and had a new one waiting for me when I got to the US in early December. I intended to use Windows XP on it, but as it would cost more to order that way (i.e., more than getting it with Vista installed), I was going to use my personally-licensed XP Professional on the new one. Some complications prevented me from making that switch so I have been using the pre-installed Vista. I’d like to share what I see as the top ten reasons I can see why you, too, should upgrade to this new operating system.

1. You’re having a quiet vacation and need something to do.
2. You’re getting bored of the stability of Windows XP or your Mac, and want to try something more challenging. You like an interesting OS that keeps you guessing what will happen next, or you miss the fun of lockups and reboots you used to have with older versions of Windows.
3. Your current computer is running too fast, not giving you enough time to make and drink your coffee.
4. When you try to run a program, you’d like your system to ask you if you really want to run the program.
5. You’d like to have Google desktop, but don’t want the bother of installing that free program. Plus, the Vista version has a picture puzzle you can play with.
6. You need an excuse to pay to upgrade to the latest version of your programs (otherwise, some won’t run on Vista).
7. All your friends are will laugh at you if you stick with XP (actually, they’re jealous).
8. You’ve got to have transparent menus and windows (though for this, I think, you’ll need more than Vista Home Basic … so be ready to pay a little more).
9. You need a way to use all those dozens of gigabytes of memory you have installed on your new machine.
10. You want to show Microsoft your support and appreciation.

Seriously, I’m quite convinced that Vista is a superior operating system, at least for businesses. Hopefully in a year or two the bugs will be worked out and it will be ready for me to try again. Meanwhile, when I get back to Nigeria, I’ll be dusting off my XP Professional CD-ROM and starting another re-install.

(BTW, don’t tell me to try Linux. I’ve got that installed also, in the Ubuntu flavor, but I still have too much invested in software and experience to abandon Windows.)

Friends, don’t bother reading this unless this is why you have come the blog. I’m only posting this here because it’s the solution to a software problem and the answer doesn’t seem to be found by Google, not easily at least.

Problem: Juice podcast receiver running on Windows platform suddenly stops working. It crashes while loading and gives a message “OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory - see c:\program files\juice\juice.exe.log” or something similar. If you check the log, you’ll see something like:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 153, in makedirs
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory


Great help, isn’t it? The short answer AFAIK is 1 of 2 things:

• The drive letter has changed for the drive where the Juice program is installed, or
• The download directory, where the podcasts are to be stored, is not available. In my case, this was because it’s on a network share that was unavailable at one point, and had to be accessed by Windows Explorer (or a “net use” command) before it was made available again.

For more information, see this post in the Juice support forum.

My life this week was dominated more than usual by computer issues. On Monday I went to the SIM office to pick up Barb and was surprised to discover that the three used GoBook laptop computers I had ordered exactly a year ago had arrived. They’d been shipped from the US in November, but in some shipping boxes that were somehow lost and not rediscovered for a few months. I’d been anxious to try them out because they were fairly inexpensive, being several years old, but of very durable construction (drop them, stand on them, spray them with water) which should be suited for work here. Unless you’re computer minded, the summary of the rest of this blog is that I spent a lot of hours getting them working (installing Windows & Linux), partly because I just couldn’t give up on getting Linux installed. That it, the rest is just technical detail (David, you can read the rest!)

Next week (which the clock says has already started), I need to get back to the reality, starting with reading and commenting on the research project proposal of one of our residents.

I started working on them Monday night and have now clocked 35 hours, some of which was well spent, a lot of trial and error, and the last three days a really frustrating mess of trying to install Ubuntu Linux. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that the computers came with blank hard drives, no CD-ROM drives, no installation software like drivers, a BIOS that can only boot from a floppy or hard drive, and no obvious way to get to the hard drives.

I went through my dwindling supply of aging floppy disks and found only a single one (later, one other) that could be formatted without errors. I’ll spare you the other details, but the bottom line is that once I discovered USB flash drive and CD-ROM drives for DOS, and made a boot disk with that precious floppy, it didn’t take long to install the Windows 98 files, run setup.exe, and have Win98 up and running. [Why Win98, you ask? Because the computers came with Win98 COA license stickers.] I probably should have stopped there, but I didn’t. Instead I went on to try to install Linux.

Ah, that was another story entirely. Now, a couple weeks earlier I had been amazed when I saw how Ubuntu installed itself so easily from a CD. If there is a way to install it reliably and easily without a (bootable) CD drive, I have yet to find it. I found quite a few explanations but most didn’t quite work.

First, I went for a network install. This meant identifying the network card type and address, making a boot disk at ROM-o-matic.net. Then install and configure DHCP and TFTP servers on Luke’s desktop running Ubuntu. A whole bunch of instructions that meant nothing much to me. A bunch of hours later, I was startled to see the boot screen appear on the laptop–it worked! Yes, but it would only install Ubuntu from the network, not from the hard drive of either computer. And with our Internet connection, that would be quite difficult.

OK, I started working on approaches to install from the hard drive. The suggestions for that involve installing boot loaders and coaxing them to run the initial installation from hard drive. Another bunch of hours later and I was surprised to see that working. Ah, problem solved? No, the installer refused to install from anywhere other than the CD-ROM and, unfortunately, I could not convince it that the CD-ROM was the right one. Maybe there’s a way to trick the program into seeing the CD-ROM image as an actual drive, but I didn’t find it.

Ultimately, I gave up and went back to the network install. It actually worked and started downloading files from the Internet. Amazingly, among the first files were ones that will scan local hard drives and CD-ROMs looking for installation images! So after downloading those, the rest of the install didn’t actually require much downloading. It still took over an hour to install.

So two hours ago I finally got Ubuntu (actually, Xubuntu) up and running on one of the three laptops. It works fine, but the font looks splotchy (even with aliasing etc.) so probably the driver is not quite the right one, and I don’t see an easy “install a new display driver” button. Oh well.

========> Bottom line

It will be nice to have Linux on these machines, maybe, as they’ll be easier to work with on the network and will be more resistant to the usual tampering by users (installing programs and viruses, etc). Still, their main use will be web browsing (our patient database is web-based), and Firefox works just fine on Win98 (with better font display than I have at the moment on Xubuntu). For all the time it’s taken, I sure hope that the added “durability” and security of Linux will be worth the trouble. Now, why can’t someone make a simple “setup.exe” for Ubuntu?

(Actually, there is an automated installation program, instlux, that seems very simple and may work great, except that it didn’t work on my laptop with Win98, and would probably have still run into the problem of the installer not liking my CD-ROM. But if you have to install SUSE or Ubuntu without using a CD-ROM or network, it looks as if instlux is what you should try first. See Ubuntu Installation from Windows.)