Dr. Dobb's Journal December, 2005
Installation beta proceeded smoothly. Our only problems were with hardware. We installed this on the test machine that had been running 64-bit Windows, and alas, that machine had been mined for memory and some other parts, and had to be reassembled. Then one of our high-speed video cards developed a fatal error. The card is fine, but the chip fan on the video board died, and it takes only seconds before the card ceases to output coherent video without the fan. I'll replace the fan, but for now we have replaced the video board. Once we had a stable system, there were no further problems.
We let the new OS reformat the hard drive, which is a pair of Seagate Serial ATA 160-GB Barracuda drives. The formatting took about 10 seconds, so clearly it employed fast format, not the more thorough formatting that inspects the drive surface. We were not offered that option; I presume that will be built into the installer in the final versions.
After that, installation was normal, except for drivers. Our first trip was to the Windows Update site, where we were told that this site doesn't support Longhorn systems. Then we went to nVidia where we got the very latest beta Vista drivers; the "very latest" don't work and produced one of our system crashes. Doing a rollback in Vista got the video system working but with an amusing (amusing now, infuriating at the time) quirk I'll tell you about later. Going to the motherboard site got us the latest Ethernet card drivers, but note that we were able to get on the Internet immediately with the generic drivers that came with Longhorn. Nvidia's Vista beta sound drivers installed without problems, and in less than an hour from when we began we had an operating Longhorn system.
When it came time to name the system, I called it "Servilia" for no particular reason—it's not a server. The name came to me from the HBO series Rome, which, incidentally, I like quite a lot.
I began playing around with Longhorn, and discovered to my horror that there was no "Start" button. That got me spending time learning things, such as that the F3 key brings up interesting search windows that don't work quite the way you expect them to. Eventually, I was able to open a "Computer" window (having fruitlessly searched for "My Computer") and use that to find some other programs, but nary a "Start." This was first amusing, then frustrating, finally infuriating.
About then Chaos Manor Associate Dan Spisak came over and experimented until he discovered that Vista was both displaying the wrong screen resolution and rendering that resolution incorrectly. This had the effect that the system thought the Start menu was on another screen when in fact it wasn't displaying on the only screen. Once this was fixed I had a normal Windows Vista to play with—there really is a Start button, as you would expect—and I fooled around with it for a few hours.
My initial impression is that I am going to like Windows Vista a lot.
Having said that, let me warn you: This is very much a beta. We have managed to crash it several times, including at least one blue screen from which no recovery was possible short of turning off the system. We have also had crashes that took out the current processes but left the rest of the operating system intact. We have had instances in which processes simply could not be killed short of reboot. You would be wise to install beta Vista on a system whose contents you don't care much about so that you can test the applications you use frequently without fear of data loss.
Much of the user interface is unfinished. As an example, the wizard for connecting a Longhorn system (again, Microsoft calls it Vista, but most of the internal information screens talk about Longhorn) to an Active Directory Microsoft Windows Network does not work, nor do a couple of other approaches to this elementary task; but once you cotton on to using the old-fashioned approach of right click on My Computer, Properties, Computer Name, and going on from there, connection to a network is quite painless and the networking works smoothly and swiftly. Of course, you need to know that My Computer is now just "Computer," but you'll discover that soon enough.
And, of course, it's still sometimes "My Computer" in some of the help documents, and if you go into various System Tools it's "My Computer," but we can be certain that Microsoft will clean up all that gubbage long before this becomes a release candidate, let alone before it gets out to the public, just as we can be sure they will put in all the help files. At the moment it can be disconcerting to find a help topic only to discover that the file consists of a placeholder and a promise to have an actual help file later.
In a word: It's a beta, and you would have to be mad to entrust any critical operations to it. On the other hand, it's different enough from Windows XP that large establishments will probably want to get it running for at least one guru to play with, because I have a feeling this is going to be pretty popular when it finally comes out.
This is very much a first look, and I can't do more than give impressions. I'll have more in future columns.
Drivers and peripherals work. After we had the system running, I installed a Plextor PX716A DVD Read/Write drive. The system recognized it instantly, and it's ready to read and write DVDs. Nero 6 installs and runs properly, or you can use the built-in Microsoft Windows capability.
Our initial system has "only" 512 MB of Kingston PC3200 DDR-SDRAM. Microsoft recommends 512 MB minimum, but for our tests this seemed to be plenty. There are three memory slots on the motherboard, and we expect to put in two Kingston 1-GB PC3200 DDR-SDRAM memory cards for a total of 2.5 GB, but I don't have the new memory yet. With only 512 MB, the user interface is crisp and reasonably intuitive.
Microsoft recommends a minimum of 1 GB for 64-bit Vista, with 2 GB recommended. Memory is cheap, and that's just as well. Programmers will add features and expand requirements to use all the memory you can give them. That's often a criticism, but in fact it can be a good thing. Code kludges to save memory have led to some notorious bugs.
We don't know just how much of the Longhorn Aero feature set has been incorporated into the beta; so far nothing spectacular beyond semitransparent windows (the transparency is adjustable, and works almost exactly like the transparency settings of dialogue and command windows in Everquest II).
Vista is pretty cool. Of course, in the coolness department, it's playing catch-up with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, which is not only cool but also stable and shipping. It's also playing a bit of catch-up to desktop Linux, as Bob Thompson points out. KDE already has much, if not all, of the Vista eye candy, and Reiser4 has a filesystem better than what we expect Vista to ship with. For most of its life Microsoft has always run scared. That is in Bill Gates' nature, and of course he was one of the few people to not only understand the implications of Moore's Law, but to act on them. Most of Microsoft's success has been due to anticipating hardware gains, which led to the philosophy of "ship it soon; the hardware will bail you out."
The big attractiveness of Vista will be its Windows applications compatibility, better search and file-organizing capabilities, and vastly improved security. Mac users can point out that except for the Windows applications compatibility, they already have all that, and for that matter, Macs run a perfectly good version of Microsoft Office that will create files you can open in Windows or Mac systems.
I decline to get into that battle. I like small computers, I've always had at least one good Apple system, and if Apple made a good TabletPC, I'd seriously consider going over to the Mac just because on the Mac everything is either very easy or impossible (and with OS X 10.4 much of the impossible becomes merely as difficult as nearly everything is with Windows). Having said that, I also have to say that I am used to Windows. It's familiar and easy enough for me to use—the difficulties come when I am trying to explain to someone else how I do something—and I haven't had a security problem for more than 10 years. And Windows has two big things going for it—games, particularly massive multiplayer online role playing games (Everquest II if you must know), and TabletPC OS and OneNote.
Mirra (http://www.mirra.com/) is a Linux-based backup server system, based on reports from a reliable reader who had installed it in his clinic. I now have the Mirra system in place, and I can say it works very much as described.
Installation is simple with one problem—the instructions tell you to wait for an orange light. Either that's wrong, or the orange LED on my Mirra system is defective. This turns out to be unimportant because the orange light is simply a signal that certain operations have been completed, and there are many alternative ways to determine that.
The beauty of the Mirra backup system is that, once it is in place and running, you never need think about it. We have in fact tested its capability to restore some crucial data files, and it works exactly as advertised. Other than that, I often forget that Mirra is here at all. It sits back in the cable room and sucks in data from four different networked machines, and It Just Works.
In particular, Mirra grabs the open outlook.pst file from Anastasia, my main communications workstation. Of course, that file is huge and changes all the time, so Mirra is often well behind; but because it is not overwriting its previous backup, there is always a more or less up-to-date backup file, and eventually there will be a quiet enough period that Mirra can catch up on my 2-GB outlook.pst file.
There is one glitch. Mirra believes that the Chaosmanor web folder where I keep the working files for The View From Chaos Manor (http://www.jerrypournelle.com/) holds system files. Nothing I can do manipulating file attributes can disabuse Mirra of that notion, and it will not attempt to backup anything in its contents. Now by its very nature, a web source file has a backup out on the web server, but this inability is annoying. I have reported it to the Mirra people and they say the next revision of their software will fix this problem. In the meantime, I run xcopy from a command line with the /e/s/d/y switches to copy the Chaosmanor folder off to our "box of drives" backup storage box.
I know there are many Linux-based backup systems, and several readers have written to recommend theirs. I have tried to open communications with some of those companies, but so far to no avail. Meanwhile, I know the Mirra system works as advertised with the one glitch about thinking that webs are system files. It's the simplest and most easily installed backup system I've run across. I have the 400-GB model, and I wonder if that's too small, but it hasn't proved to be. Recommended.
The game of the month is Microsoft's Dungeon Siege II, which is an improvement over the already enjoyable Dungeon Siege I. You can play Dungeon Siege alone, in a LAN party with friends, or online with either friends or a pickup group, and it's as good a way to while away an afternoon as any. My preference in online games remains Everquest II, but then I have a lot of time and energy invested in that. I used to like Star Wars Galaxies a lot but they kept tweaking it until it really wasn't so much fun any longer, at least for me. In any event, you won't regret getting Dungeon Siege II, although you may find yourself spending too much time investigating one more place; it's very seductive that way.
There are two Computer Books of the Month. Maven: A Developer's Notebook, by Vincent Massol and Timothy O'Brien (O'Reilly & Associates, 2005), is about the Maven Java "project comprehension tool" for building your project. Chances are if you don't work on Java projects (and perhaps even if you do), you have never heard of Maven; which is one reason to look into this book, if only to see whether you ought to learn more.
Second is Brian Hook's Write Portable Code: An Introduction To Developing Software for Multiple Platforms (No Starch Press, 2005). I am neither a user nor an admirer of any variant of C—I remain stubbornly convinced that strongly typed languages with range checking make for far better code with far less debugging—but experienced C users advise me that I will not go wrong by recommending this book.
DDJ