No Windows 8? Next stop for Microsoft is Windows Y?
An update: If you read last week's article but didn't follow the link, you might not have noticed that April Fools Day is an anagram for Larsyip Öoldaf.

A Week Without Windows

Although Linux offers most of what I need (you, too!) it's not possible for me to give up Windows and that will hold true for the foreseeable future because I use Microsoft and Adobe applications (both at the office and at home) that require Windows. But could I survive for a week without Microsoft products at home? Let's see.

I started writing this in JEedit (instead of UltraEdit) on my notebook computer (instead of the desktop) and, because it's a dual-boot system, I'm running Ubuntu Linux 10.10 (instead of Windows 7). My goal is to use only open-source applications that run under Linux for a week at home. At the end of the week I'll need to return to Windows for access to the Adobe Creative Suite.

This means 6 days without Word, Excel, or Access. A week without Outlook or The Bat. A week without Dreamweaver, InDesign, Photoshop, or Premiere (Elements). The Linux world has analogs for most of the Microsoft products, but there's really no open-source substitute for InDesign, Dreamweaver, or Premiere. And there's no analog in the Windows world for The Bat. It's an uncommonly robust e-mail application. So this could be a long week.

Just a few minutes into the test, either JEdit or Ubuntu became unresponsive and I needed to reboot the system. This is exactly the kind of thing that can happen with Windows or Appple's OS X. Under Windows with UltraEdit, my lost paragraph would have been saved. In this case, it was lost. Or so I thought. Later, I discovered that JEdit had indeed saved a copy of the document with the no-longer-missing paragraph.

When DOS ruled the desktop, I pressed Ctrl-S at the end of every paragraph to avoid losing work when the computer crashed. Although I no longer consistently do that because Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 7 have become increasingly stable, I still save frequently.

What puzzles me about the Microsoft haters I encounter is that they don't seem to notice with OS X or Linux crash. I've used Linux off an on for 5 years or more. I've used Apple's OS X since 2001. Both Linux and OS X crash, as does Windows. Every operating system crashes. A compter is a compter. An operating system is an operating system. At this stage of hardware and software development, crashes are to be expected.

The balance of this report will be more in the form of a diary than a formal report—things that occur to me during the week without Windows.

Password Management: You Can't Get There From Here

I have a lot of passwords and most of them aren't exactly memorable. Even if they were memorable, I would have trouble remembering, site by site, does this one use memorable password 37 or memorable password 52?

On Windows, I use KeePass 2, but that's not available on Linux. Instead, there's KeePass X. Unfortunately, KeePass X doesn't understand KeePass 2 files. It would understand a KeePass 1 file, but I can't export that from the Windows system. I could export an XML file, but KeePass X didn't undertand that, either. I could export a CSV file, but KeePass X doesn't import those. Then I tried Revelation Password Manager. No luck.

KeePass encrypts the password file and that's important, particularly on a notebook computer. But I'm not going to spend all day entering accounts and passwords into a new application on the Linux machine. Instead, I installed CryptKeeper and set up an entrypted directory. Next I opened the KeePass CSV export in the Open Office spreadsheet program and saved it as an ODS file in the encrypted directory.

Problem solved.

Ubuntu is a Great Video Player

Both DVDs and saved videos in various formats work exceptionally well once you find either the right player application or the right plug-ins or some combination of the two.

This may be partially because Linux seems to place a lighter load on system resources and partially because I have fewer concurrent applications that burden system resources. The combined difference on system load is substantial.

Faster Start and Stop; More Reliable Sleep

From power on to operating system main screen is about 35 seconds for Linux (system usable in about 40 seconds) compared to 55 seconds for Windows (system usable in about 90 seconds). Shut down is even more dramatic: 5 seconds for Linux compared to the usual 25 to 60 seconds for Windows.

In addition to that, when I wake the Linux system from sleep mode, problems are rare. Windows, on the other hand, either crashes during sleep or crashes on restart at least thirty percent of the time. These tests were conducted on a single dual-boot computer, so hardware differences don't account for the performance differences.

An Irrelevlant and Immaterial Concern

I'm used to a Microsoft split keyboard and the notebook has, well, a notebook keyboard. That makes typing painful (literally) because of the unnatural position my hands must assume. The notebook is also desk height instead of keyboard-drawer height.

This isn't an operating system problem, but I need to fix it. Fortunately, I have an old keyboard. Unforutunately, it has a PS/2 connector. Fortunately PS/2 to USB keyboard adapters exist for $2 to $10. Unfortunately, shipping for a $2 item is $10. Fortunately, Office Max has them in stock. Unfortunately, they cost $19 at Office Max. Fortunately, Staples has them in stock. Unfortunately, they cost $35 at Staples. Hmmm. A company that sells through Amazon.com has them for $6 with a shipping fee of $5. And another Amazon seller has them for $1.35 with $2.95 shipping. Done. Total $4.30 and I'll have it in a week.

As it turned out, the device was faulty and the vendor quickly refunded by $4.30.

Listening to Music

One of the big mistakes I made with Itunes was selecting Apple's AAC (M4A) file format for music instead of the more widely used MP3 and there aren't a lot of Linux applications that play M4A files but the Totem Movie Player does.

Another small problem resolved.

Can I use Linux to move music from Itunes to an Ipod or a Touch? Probably not but then I can't use Windows to do that, either. The software that Apple writes for operating systems other than its own (borrowed) BSD isn't very successful. If I plug an Ipod Touch into my Windows 7 64-bit system running the "64-bit" version of Itunes, Itunes crashes. If I plug my Ipod 3G into my Windows 7 64-bit system running the "64-bit" version of Itunes, Itunes crashes and deletes all the files on the Ipdod. Classy!

I place "64-bit" inside scare quotes because the 64-bit version of Itunes isn't really a 64-bit application. It installs into "Program Files (x86)" instead of "Program Files".

It's so surprising to me that Apple would label a 32-bit application as a 64-bit application. Sure.

Bye Bye Touchpapd Mousie

When I run Windows on my notebook computer, I have an application that disables the touchpad mouse as I type, so I went searching for something like that under Ubuntu Linux. What I found was better and it required just 3 commands to download and install.

According to UbuntuGuide.net:

Then I ran the new application, set it to autostart with Ubuntu and to automatically turn off the touchpad whenever I plug in a mouse. It doesn't get much easier than this! I liked it so much that I went searching for a similar utility for Windows.

The mouse driver offered only "enable" and "disable" but the diver was from 2008—version 11 and Synaptics is on version 15. It was out of date when I bought the system. I thought maybe the update would have that functionality.

Attempting to obtain the update crashed the Chrome browser, so I tried Firefox. An update that tried to load appeared to revert the version 4 release candidate of Firefox to version 3 (actually, it didn't) and then crashed. I eventually got the new driver but setting a restore point before installing it caused Windows to crash.

I continued without a restore point and the driver installation crashed, which wasn't too surprising considering everything else that had crashed, so I rebooted. Windows crashed while trying to play the logoff sound. Classy! Then, after watching "Shutting down" for 5 minutes with no apparent computer activity, I pressed the power switch.

On reboot, Windows explained to me that it had not been shut down properly. Actually, I already knew that. Several minutes later, when Windows was fully operational, I started the Synaptics update again. The process told me that a previous version of the driver was already installed and that I should uninstall it first. Most applications are smart enough to update previous versions of themselves.

When I closed the installer, Windows told me that it suspected the application hadn't installed properly. Actually, I knew that, too. I found the Synaptics driver and uninstalled it. Then, of course, it was reboot time. Again.

Installing the new driver required yet another system restart, but you probably expected that.

The Windows 7 Start Menu had a new application: Synaptics Scrybe. I started it and the Synaptics icon appeared in the Tray but there was no option to turn off the trackpad when a mouse is plugged in. I selected Properties. The new driver has a dozen or more special "gestures" to make the trackpad more useful, but there's still no option to disable the trackpad when a mouse is plugged in. I thought of several gestures that would be appropriate at this point but didn't use any of them.

As with all devices, there's an option to disable it. I selected that. Aha! The user can save a profile, so I saved the profile with the trackpad disabled. Synaptics outsmarted me again! Selecting any other profile permanently re-enables the trackpad .

I usually have a mouse plugged in and don't need the trackpad, so I just disabled it. If I ever do need the trackpad, I'll also need a mouse to re-enable it. But if I have a mouse, I won't need to re-enable it. (Circular thinking: See "thinking, circular".)

There are those who will say sincerely that Linux is "just too hard to use." Although I could cite instances in which Windows does something a lot easier than Linux does, I must point out that it took less than 5 minutes to find and install the process that disables the trackpad—on command or when a mouse is plugged in—under Linux. For Windows, the best I could do was find a way to manually turn the trackpad off (and needing a mouse to turn it back on if I ever want to).

That process required restarting the computer many times and consumed more than 90 minutes.

Yeah, Linux sure is harder than Windows!

Bye Bye to Caps Lock, Too

You may recall my description of disabling the Caps Lock key in Windows a year or so ago. It involved some tedious key mapping in the Registry to map the scan code from the Caps Lock key to nothing.

Fixing this in Linux turned out to be just as hard as disabling the trackpad.

A quick Google search led me to a Blogger who said "I hate the Caps Lock Key! Many times I type my blogs without looking at the screen and after typing in a couple of sentences, I realize my mistake. Typing in 'jOHN sMITH' makes me feel like a monkey."

The blogger then went on to explain how to add one line to the Linux .profile file (xmodmap -e "clear Lock") to fix the problem permanently. nO MORE ACCIDENTALLY TYPING LIKE THIS FOR ME.

Firefox 4 When?

One Linux annoyance is that Firefox updates arrive at a speed that can only be described as glacial. If you want beta or release candidate versions, you’re encouraged to install them in a way that will make future updates difficult. And when the new version is released to all other platforms, Linux is at the back of the line.

Firefox 4, which I’ve been using for a while on my Windows machines, was released on March 22nd. But not for Linux (or, more accurately, it wasn’t released in a way that Ubuntu users can install it automatically.) Given Ubuntu’s and Firefox’s shared open-source heritage, I just don’t understand this. Firefox 4 may show up in the Ubuntu Software Center or the Synaptic Package Manager in a week or two, but I didn’t want to wait.

Fortunately, Johannes Eva explains how to install Firefox the right way on Ubuntu. How difficult is this? What I type at the command prompt below is shown in Courier bold.

bblinn@laptop:~$ cd /opt
This moves to the directory where I will install Firefox.
bblinn@laptop:/opt$ sudo mv ~/Downloads/firefox .
[sudo] password for bblinn: here I typed my password
I now move (mv) the new firefox directory from Downloads to opt (.) and because I need superuser privileges to do this and used "sudo" as part of the command, I'm asked for my password.
bblinn@laptop:/opt$ sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-old
To keep the previous version of Firefox around, I rename the old version, which is located in bin. In Linux, "mv" can move or rename a file.
bblinn@laptop:/opt$ sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
This final command creates a symbolic link that allows all of my existing menu entries and shortcuts to work with the new version of Firefox and, if I want to use it, the old version remains on the computer.

And with that, Firefox 4 is running on the Linux machine.

At the End of the Week

"At the end of the week" is a lot like "at the end of the day", except that the time period is slightly longer. Seven times longer, to be more or less precise. At the end of the day or the week, I found a lot to like about Linux and that surprised me not at all.

Bits and Pieces

The first segment is so long that for variety's sake the rest of today's program will be short items that struck my interest this week. My interest is actually black and blue from having been struck so much but it will heal.

Internet Explorer 9: XP Users Need Not Apply

If you're running Windows 7 or Vista, you may already have Internet Explorer 9, which is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions but only for Vista or 7. The download was pushed out by Microsoft this week.

My primary browser is still Firefox (version 4, beta) and my default browser is Chrome (version 10, Official Build 79063) but Internet Explorer could slow the ongoing market erosion because it's a very good browser.

When compared to previous versions of IE, IE9 is faster and more secure. It's too bad that XP users won't benefit from hardware acceleration that's new to IE9 or to IE9's support for HTML5. Chrome and Firefox provide these, so maybe this will accelerate the market erosion among the users of older operating systems.

If Windows Update didn't update your browser to IE9 yet and you'd like to install the latest, you can download the IE9 installer here.

Avatar: Yes, There Will Be a Sequel

Director James Cameron says a sequel will be even better because the frame rate will be higher. The film frame rate used to be 24 frames per second. Television runs at 30 (rounded) frames per second. Cameron is talking about doubling that!

"When you author and project a movie at 48 or 60, it becomes a different movie. The 3D shows you a window into reality; the higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window. In fact, it is just reality. It is really stunning," Cameron said at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

That kind of frame rate would make the motion even more fluid than it already is. Cameron's production partner Jon Landau says that the higher frame rate would eliminate a strobing effect caused by what he terms a 3D "artefact". In 3D movies, the frame rate is essentially halved because the left and right views are projected separately.

Spam Drops, But It Will Be Back

Microsoft haters aren't going to like this, but Microsoft led the effort to kill the Rustock botnet and doing so significantly reduced spam. At least for now.

Symantec says spam volumes dropped by about one-third worldwide after March 16 when the Rustock botnet was immobilized. Rustock was one of the most technically sophisticated botnets to spew spam and it had been active since 2006.

The next question is whether the botnet "owners" can regain control of "their" machines.

According to the Symantec's report, the largest percentage of spam (about 12%) comes from the Russian Federation. Second place (a little less than 9%) is held by India. Brazil is next at about 6% and the US is in 4th place at less than 5%. For the first time in recent history, none of the top 10 spam sources was in Europe.

Windows 8? Windows Ate What?

No, this isn't an April Fool's Joke. Windows 8 is coming and there are reports that some of the larger OEMs (read that: HP and Dell) have seen the code.

According to WinRumors, Microsoft has begun to distribute early copies of Windows 8 to key OEM partners. The distribution is build 7971.0.110324-1900. WinRumors says that this is "milestone 3".

The report notes "Microsoft has so far been extremely quiet on the Windows 8 front. Windows Chief, Steven Sinofsky, took to the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January to introduce a technology preview of Microsoft's Windows ARM support and show off an early build of Windows 8. Microsoft is partnering with ARM-based manufactures NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments to produce new Tablet devices."

I repeat: This is not the April Fool's Edition.

Dropping the One-Too-Many App

All right, that's not actually the app's name, but Google and Apple have been asked to ban apps that identify the locations of drunk-driving checkpoints.

Attorneys general for Delaware and Maryland say applications that let smartphone users know where drunk-driving checkpoints are located should not be permitted. The AGs have asked Google and Apple to eliminate the applications.

Four US senators made similar requests recently and RIM (Research In Motion), the maker of Blackberry phones, pulled a similar application from its online store.

Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden says, "We are urging Apple and Google to do the right thing and join us in keeping drunk drivers off our roads, not provide them with a road map to avoid checkpoints that are meant to protect our families."

Democratic Senators Harry Reid of Nevada, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Charles Schumer of New York, and Tom Udall of New Mexico also recently sent letters to Apple, Google, and RIM noting that more than 10 thousand people die every year in alcohol-related crashes.

"Giving drunk drivers a free tool to evade checkpoints, putting innocent families and children at risk, is a matter of public concern," the senators said.

Microsoft Sues Google

Microsoft says Google is cheating when it comes to search. Google has more than 90% of the search market in Europe. So that leaves (hmm, quick math here) less than 10% of the market for Microsoft Bing.

Google officially says that the action was expected. Google says it's continuing to discuss the case with the European Commission. Google's annual income is $30 billion and most of that comes from search.

Microsoft says that it needs access to YouTube to compete with Google and Google, of course, owns YouTube. Microsoft also accuses Google of preventing advertisers and online agencies from using third-party software to make the information accessible via competing ad platforms such as Microsoft's Adcenter.