Dual Booting Laptop: Win7, Slackware

Bam! School’s in. The inevitable has happened and the most hideously busy few months of my educational life have begun: the university applications term. And to support this packed timetable I reckoned I’d need some pretty decent technological backing. In other words Windows Vista had to go.

I’d been wanting to rid my laptop of this slick but extremely ungainly and messy monster for some time (ever since I bought the laptop actually) – it crashed at a very embarrassing moment at Young Rewired State (plugged into a projector in front of a big audience with lots of media cameras pointed at me…) which was probably the last straw for me, and it’s had reliably frequent networking issues (wifi and ethernet took it in turns to fail). After testing out Win7 on old machines and liking it, I decided to go for a dual boot with Win7 and Slackware – my opinion is that Linux shouldn’t be all about Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian and I reckoned this would be a good opportunity to give a less mainstream distro a try. There was of course a snag: the main reason I held off uninstalling Vista was that I had a setup of Firefly installed (for my freelance work) which had taken literally half a day to set up so I wasn’t too keen on losing that; clearly virtualisation is the key to the problem here. So I created a new VM in Virtualbox and installed Firefly and supporting software (SQL server, IIS etc.) onto that.

So I backed up my data and installed Win7 and Slackware side-by-side. The last thing Vista did for me was crash while trying to resize a partition so I took a chainsaw (= cfdisk) to my HDD and annihilated Vista. OK I’ll admit the reason I deleted Vista was because I screwed up and hit ctrl+c while cfdisk was running … oops. And I somehow managed to forget to install LILO (boot manager) at first so started off with no boot OS which was just a tad concerning … but in the end everything worked out! I’m using a ~100GB NTFS partition for Win7 + Windows programs. Slackware has ~20GB of ext3 and there’s a 100GB NTFS data drive.

Partition Table for my HDD. In hindsight I should really have used a separate partition for Windows programs and a swap partition. Oh well... Click to embiggen

VirtualBox running in Slackware. It's so much more convenient using virtual machines - they can be transferred from Win7 to Slackware or my desktop or even to someone in China; the portability factor is seriously useful

Linux on laptops, especially Slackware, is all about hackery and cool stuff so I’m hoping to implement sometime soon multitouch gestures (which Mac users have) and customise the OS beyond recognition.

Goods

I was also apprehensive that Windows 7 would fail to realise my laptop has a wifi card thus negating the entire point of the operation, but in the end everything works and wifi was set up as part of the installation process; even standby and hibernate which always crashed the computer in Vista work in Win7! Every time I use the OS I find some small but hugely awesome new little feature that makes me love it just that little bit more. MS have got it right this time in my opinion and I hope it sells well. And I couldn’t help but feel just a little smug when one of my friends came in with a new laptop with Vista on it complaining to me about a wifi failure…

Slackware’s also pretty great – it installed literally in about 15 minutes. I was slightly annoyed at first that it doesn’t have a package manager like apt-get or yum (or at least I can’t seem to find one) but actually now I find svn and make/make install more than adequate substitutes; although installing software is now a lengthier process I get up-to-date packages and have more control over installation. Even better (for me), Slackware starts with a command line and the GUI has to be started manually. So next time someone asks to borrow my laptop to check email be warned: you’ll be using lynx!!

Problems

There are still two things I can’t work out:

1. I’ve got all my Virtualbox information in the shared drive and I’ve managed to boot VMs in both OSes. However if I save the machine state in Win7 and then boot into Slackware it doesn’t seem possible to restore that saved state. If I run that state-saved VM in Slackware and save a new state then return to Win7, Win7 restores the state saved in Win7, not the one in Slackware. A perplexing problem – google time methinks.

2. Linux in general is allergic to Intel Wifi cards. Enough said; though I managed to connect through wifi in Backtrack 3 (not 4 beta though!) so maybe if I do a little driver shuffling it might work eventually.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this. I didn’t intend to do much advertising in this post but I would certainly recommend Win7. At least give the RCs a try – it is *so* worth it. And having two very good OS’s should give me a huge amount of freedom: Win7 does what I *need* and Slackware does what I *want*. Perfect.

Songbird v Foobar

Interestingly enough I switched away from iTunes 7 and haven’t touched it ever since their highly hyped update to 8. I switched to foobar2000 which is actually a pretty awesome bit of software. I have however been constantly hearing about Songbird and its amazing features so I’ve now finally got round to installing it and testing it out. Here are my thoughts.

Foobar > Songbird

One of the reasons I switched away from iTunes in the first place was obscene memory usage. I’m not sure how iTunes 8 is with memory but I had many grievances about the performance of iTunes 7 when I used it. Testing Songbird on a decent laptop (3GB RAM, Intel Core2 Duo T8100 @ 2.10 GHz, a processor that benchmarks faster than most in its clock speed range), it took 5 seconds for the program to start up fully while foobar loaded instantly. Foobar’s memory footprint was absolutely miniscule at 10MB while Songbird required a hefty 80MB, though that’s fairly unsurprising considering its capabilities as a browser.

In terms of usability, as a foobar2000 user, I miss features like Cursor Follows Playback (and more importantly Playback Follows Cursor), complete ID3 tag control, advanced syntactical filters and fully customisable shortcut keys, for which I have yet to find Songbird extensions. Whatever the case these are minor concerns and are bound to be ironed out / provided in the long run by extensions or built in natively. However my concern is that Songbird seems directed more at less savvy / control-freak users who don’t necessarily want to use something like a RegEx string or SQL query to perform operations or filter their music – the functionality is based more around forms and buttons rather than console, debug window and command prompt. While most people probably welcome this user-friendly approach, I personally enjoy the ‘hackability’ and almost complete controllability of foobar. Of course, since Songbird is open-source a real hardcore user may prefer to hard code in mods, though I for one prefer not to have to recompile software to make it do what I want.

There are also several components which come natively with foobar (or as pre-installed plugins) such as ReplayGain (very important; Songbird’s equivalent is the ‘VolumeProfiles’ addon); minimise to tray (again critical [to me]; Songbird has the ‘MinimizeToTray’ addon); and a ‘resume playback after restart’ option (a nice touch to foobar; Songbird has an addon called ‘last track resume’).

This demonstrates the syntax of a Foobar preference element - a lot of the preferences are like this. There's just so much control

You can even control exactly what text is in the window title, status bar and system tray tooltip

Songbird > Foobar

Enough nitpicking. Songbird really does have some really awesome features. Its integration with the web is very nciely done – I get the impression more or less every online music service is supported to some extent, and the whole browser integration is a brilliant idea. Foobar’s web integration comes in the form of ‘freedb’ which I assume is some sort of tags downloader though it’s never given me any vaguely sensible suggestions so isn’t very good. There’s also a mini player built in which foobar doesn’t seem to have without resorting to skinning. Ratings are native which foobar is critically missing – you have to use ‘quick tagger’ [addon]. The default iTunes interface was offputting at first but the browse library by artist/genre/album etc at the top is another feature foobar lacks but Songbird has. And, of course, Songbird is open source.

It’s interesting that Songbird was developed as an open source project thus appealing to the techies while also being amazingly pleasant to use with some of the most useful and critial features built in and vast extensionability. Someone commented Songbird is like the Firefox of media players. I can’t say I disagree.

I find the way they've built a media player around a browser quite cool and certainly in line with the whole web integration thing

Songbird has a clear iTunes-like interface and the mashTape (web integration with artist/song info, reviews, even youtube) is a pretty cool feature IMHO

Songbird, Foobar > iTunes

Despite a slow load time, Songbird wipes the floor with iTunes when it comes to performance. There was a problem with iTunes 7 in which scrolling through a large library was a misery owing to the intense slowness of just about everything. Songbird on the other hand is actually pretty snappy. And of course Foobar runs like lighting.
Both are extensionable. I know there are iTunes addons etc. but both these alternatives take extensionability to a much higher level. Songbird probably uses extensions about as much as Firefox while Foobar takes extensionability to an extreme by more or less requiring them to function normally (hence the pre-installed ones).
And of course neither associates itself with a store that sells DRM music So it’s all good.

Overall, based on my experience of them so far, both are far more than adequate replacements for iTunes (unless you’re a fool and actually use the iTunes store in which case your music is useless if played by anything but Apple products). Foobar even has support for iPods (not sure about Songbird). Neither has performance issues, and both are more or less customisable enough for the standard user. If you’re after an easy and pleasant-to-use player with an automatically decent-looking interface with truly wonderful web integration, go download Songbird. If you’re a control-freak in search of hackability and control almost to the extent of writing your own RegEx (and also a completely no-nonsense player), foobar’s the one for you. On the other hand if you want a program that is slow, memory-hogging and defaults to buying music from a store with hideous DRM, go ahead and download iTunes.

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The Pirate Bay Situation

It’s big (and by now fairly vintage) news in the torrenting and general technology community that a verdict has been reached for the lawsuit against The Pirate Bay’s four founders. I won’t say much about the gory details of the trials – there are plenty of articles on good websites that will give you all sorts of facts; I’m just going to state some of my opinions on the matter. In case you don’t already know, the verdict was a jail sentence and a $3.6M fine.

Firstly my thoughts on file sharing in general. BitTorrent is used for a whole host of good things – I’ve used it on multiple occasions to grab up-to-date linux distributions and it’s a fantastic way to download without limitations on server upload speeds (private trackers have exceptionally high ratios and speeds but linux and other open source stuff tends to download fast as well even on public trackers). There’s also the whole debate about whether or not piracy really does harm the economy as much as Sony would like us to think. But personally I think there’s no hope for companies trying to shut down piracy because it stems directly from the entire point of the internet: sharing information. If torrenting somehow gets shut down (an incredibly unlikely scenario), an alternative P2P system will immediately spring up to replace it, and there are a great many out there waiting to be exploited. But basically what I’m saying is that an attempt to target the infrastructure of filesharing is just a pathetic way for companies to seek some sort of revenge for probably mostly imagined and definitely largely over-hyped and bloated losses.

It is transparently obvious that the trial is much bigger than just The Pirate Bay – the verdict poses a threat to the entire community of file sharing. The Pirate Bay may have had certain special circumstances that made this verdict even vaguely plausible: something to do with Sweden possibly. But the verdict has set an incredibly dangerous precedent – if the team really end up facing significant jail time and massive fines, it would serve as a massive deterrant to anyone even considering starting up a novel platform for sharing, be it open-source software, ideas or whatever. My opinion is that the entire spirit of a collaborative internet is being broken apart piece by piece, while the pirates will still always find a method of sharing illegally obtained and distributed material. The supposedly illegal side always tends to be far more determined to keep sharing than the average supposedly law-abiding person who is probably fairly ambivalent anyway about whether or not to share those photos on Flickr.

There’s also a huge amount of wastage. I noticed Isohunt have put a notice on their front page linking to some legal material. I wouldn’t be surprised if other trackers are calling their lawyers right now, preparing for a legal assault on their communities. I’m not saying lawyers’ pay is waste, but the sheer amount of effort and time going into nit-picking against a multi-corporate legal mob in front of an unconvinced and generally non-tech-savvy jury seems to me at least a somewhat inefficient use of resources.

And to keep everything in perspective, the recording industry are fighting against a phenomenon they themselves are helping to create. The measures being adopted to prevent piracy such as music DRM make life a misery for law-abiding citizens who pay for their music; for example iTunes forced all its customers to re-download and thus re-buy all their music just to (supposedly) remove one layer of DRM from audio files. All this hassle actually makes pirated music of higher quality than purchased music, a ridiculous situation created by companies like Apple. How can anyone blame me if I decide to download a torrent of a few songs (which I’ve already paid for) just to be able to play them in something other than iTunes?

In my opinion, it will become increasingly difficult in the future to download plain DRM-free music and films, and indeed the risk of being caught doing so will probably increase, as will the penalty. The current trend is that more and more companies are getting involved – once it was just bodies such as the MPAA and RIAA who were targeting file sharers. Then more private companies joined in for the money such as MediaDefender, and now even ISPs and governments have joined the witch-hunt. If you want my take on this, I suggest that if you already download and share pirated material, do so while you can and max out on it; the window of opportunity to get hold of clean untrackable media may well be closing.

Good hunting

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One reason I don’t use Apple products

I’m generally a great fan of anything that contains the word Unix in its literature. Unfortunately there is one company which defies my rule: Apple.

My reason this time is, leaving aside what people may fallaciously argue about superior software and nicer looks, Apple products do break, and in fact do so more frequently than most people think; and when they do break there’s nothing you can do yourself. iPods and iPhones and other i-am-a-little-apple-portable-gadget’s are simply not meant for reverse engineering. Which means you end up wasting days on end at the ‘Genius bar’ while your friend who uses a PC has already sorted his problems by himself.

Evidence? Take a look at Alex Muller’s blog post. Now, normally if a CD gets stuck in a non-Mac computer it’s fine, even if it’s a laptop: it’s a mere matter of pulling a lever to open up the machine, taking out the optical drive, and applying a screwdriver and some brute force if necessary. With a Mac? The best you can really do is stare at the white plastic airtight sealed bubble that your CD has been eaten by and despair. Apart from that, there are numerous stories of iPods simply not working for no apparent reason and iPhones getting wet with no way to take them apart or even to turn them off to dry.

By contrast, I’ve had: a Dell Dimension 9150 for almost five years which has not failed me once (apart from the time I reinstalled the Intel drivers which was really my fault for not letting the installation finish); a crappy mp3 player which runs off AAA batteries and also a relatively new Samsung one, both of which which have worked drenched in pouring rain; a 10-year-old (or older maybe – I don’t know) Compaq which has been running Ubuntu reliably as a server for several weeks now; a Palm Zire 21 (yes, one of the old B&W ones) for … years which has again never failed me apart from running out of battery; a Toshiba Satellite A300 Laptop for two months which has not had any hardware problems (it’s on Vista, of course it’s had blue screens); the list goes on…

So my reason, in short, is that I wouldn’t be able to cope with being entirely at the mercy of the support team at the Genius Bar, and would far prefer to do my repairs and sort out my problems myself.