Tag Archives: Install

Assorted Ramblings, Tech

Software Reinstall

Choosing to go from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7, also meant choosing to do a “custom” installation of Windows. Meaning that I have to reinstall all my programs.
Still more to be added over the next few days, but here’s what I’ve got so far.
The List:
General Computing

  • Open Office – compatible with MS Office
  • Mozy Home Unlimited (paid version) – after a horrendous support experience this summer, I’m not as big a fan of this company as I used to be, but I do like the concept of automatic offsite backups.
  • Avast! Anti-virus – free alternative to the various paid security suites. (The main deterrent to malware is still a healthy degree of skepticism when clicking links.)
  • Foxit Reader – alternative PDF reader
  • VLC media player – plays dang near everything in terms of video or audio, and doesn’t bring unwanted baggage.
  • Paint.Net – Image editor.
  • 7-Zip – Fairly universal archive/extract tool. Even opens ISO files!
  • InfraRecorder – Burn CDs and DVDs
  • Picasa – photo management.
  • VMWare Workstation – For software I don’t trust, for experimenting with other software environments (e.g. Linux), and other situations where my primary computer isn’t the best choice.

Internet Tools

  • Firefox – Web Browser
    • Firebug – Debugging tool for use with Firrefox.
  • Thunderbird – because I like desktop email
  • Putty – Client for Telnet, SSH and FTP, plus it’s scriptable. (I’m not sure where to find this anymore.)
  • Chrome – Web Browser from Google.
  • Adobe Flash Player
  • FileZilla – Both regular and Secure FTP.

Developer Tools

Tech

Migrating Mozilla Profiles

I bit the bullet today and installed Windows 7 on my primary computer. All in all, it was a fairly painless process, though because I was switching from 32-bit to 64 (I can finally use that 4th GB of RAM!), I had to do a “custom” install which means I have to reinstall all my programs as well. For most purposes, it’s very much like moving to a new computer.
One of my gripes with Firefox and Thunderbird is that while the installers for both applications are very helpful about importing settings (passwords, network configurations, etc) from competing products, neither one provides a facility for migrating settings from your previous computer.
Fortunately, with a little bit of knowledge, it’s not overly difficult to do this by hand (which is probably why nobody – myself included – has written an appropriate migration tool).
Disclaimer: I don’t use many plugins, so I don’t know if or how well these steps will work with plugin settings. You’ll probably want to wait until after the migration before installing any plugins on the new system.

Copying your Firefox settings

Start off by installing Firefox on the new computer, all we’re copying is the user settings, not the software installation. I recommend you make certain that both the old computer and the new one are running the same version of the browser. (I’m not certain this is completely necessary, but it’s better to be safe.)
Next, one the old computer, you’ll need to use Windows Explorer to visit the directory where Firefox stores its settings.

  • On XP: the path is
    C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
  • On Vista or Win 7: the path is
    C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

<username> is, of course, the username you use to log into the computer. (You can find this by going to a command prompt and typing “net config workstation”.)
The “Application Data” or “AppData” directory is usually hidden, so you may have to blind type the path into the Explorer address bar.
On the old computer, make a copy of the “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory.
On the new computer, go the corresponding path on the new computer, delete the existing “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory, and replace them with the copies you made from the old one.

Copying your Thunderbird settings

Start off by installing Thunderbird on the new computer, all we’re copying is the user settings, not the software installation. I recommend you make certain that both the old computer and the new one are running the same version. (I’m not certain this is completely necessary, but it’s better to be safe.)
Next, one the old computer, you’ll need to use Windows Explorer to visit the directory where Thunderbird stores its settings.

  • On XP: the path is
    C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Thunderbird
  • On Vista or Win 7: the path is
    C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird

<username> is, of course, the username you use to log into the computer. (You can find this by going to a command prompt and typing “net config workstation”.)
The “Application Data” or “AppData” directory is usually hidden, so you may have to blind type the path into the Explorer address bar.
On the old computer, make a copy of the “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory.
On the new computer, go the corresponding path on the new computer, delete the existing “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory, and replace them with the copies you made from the old one.

Other notes

  • I don’t know why Thunderbird doesn’t store its settings under the Mozilla directory. Presumably this is a philosophical difference between the two projects.
  • Everything I’d read about a “custom installation” of Windows 7 had me thinking that the hard drive would be reformatted. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is not the case. (Doing a backup is still highly recommended!)
  • Consequently, in the case where the “old computer” is the same physical box, you can find the old “users” directory stored in C:\windows.old. Presumably this would also apply to the “Application Data” directory when upgrading from XP (XP users must do a custom installation when updating to Windows 7). My upgrade was on a Vista machine, so I can’t say for certain what happens with XP.
Tech

Android Integration

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As nearly as I can tell, I’m about the only person in North America who isn’t on Facebook. (Evidently all three of my brothers have joined – though apparently none of them are fully aware of the others’ presence yet.) But I have gone and joined a different cult — I now have a Google Android-based telephone (the T-Mobile G-1).
For me, one of the most appealing parts of the Android phone is the way it integrates your phone book and calendar with Google’s contact manager (built into GMail) and calendar. That’s a fairly killer application for me in that it makes everything a whole lot more portable. The only problem is, GMail isn’t my primary means of contact. I’ve had my Dactylmanor address for more than eight years and prefer to use that one.
GMail offers a partial solution to this in that you can set it up to send messages from another address. The down side to this is that messages go out saying they’re from the GMail address on behalf of the Dactylmanor one. So when other people see it (primarily folks who are using GMail as their main address), they tend to capture the GMail address in their contact lists. If they then write to me at GMail instead of Dactylmanor, it could be a while before I see it.
Being forced to move to GMail as my primary email address would have been a deal-breaker for me. A lot of people know to contact me through Dactylmanor and I really don’t want to deal with managing two addresses. (It’s been more than four years since I got rid of my landline phone, but I still occasionally hear about people calling the old number.)
So I went looking to see if there was a way to get an Android to work with non GMail address. One of the free services Google makes available is “Google Apps for Your Domain“; essentially, they provide a version of GMail, Calendar and their online Documents and Spreadsheet tools that work with a domain name you own. (For example, dactylmanor.org!) I figured that would be my best bet.
The first stop in my investigation was a thread on the Android Community Forums where someone was asking the exact same question I was: Does Android work with Google Apps for Your Domain?
And the answer is a resounding yes. Brilliant! (Apparently Google didn’t plan to do this, but later changed their minds.)
The first thing you have to do is setup your email to go to Google’s mail server. The instructions for that show up in the administration panel when you activate the email system. It’s mildly tedious, but fairly straightforward. You do need to have the ability to set custom records in your domain’s DNS server. (Pair makes this fairly simple.)
When I’m at home, I prefer to use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email rather than Google’s web interface. Setting up a desktop email client is also fairly simple, though given the number of them in existence, it’s not possible to document the step-by-step for every system out there. Google’s instructions provide the basic information for server settings, plus a double-handful of the most common clients.
Throw in the Lightning calendar addon for Thunderbird (as well as the provider for Google calendar), and at this point you have something equivalent to Microsoft Outlook, except that along with Windows, you can also run on Mac, Linux and a few other platforms.
Bringing the Android phone into the mix requires that you dig into it’s settings a little (Home Screen | Menu | SD card & phone storage | Factory data reset) and click the button for “Factory data reset.” (Yeah, that step’s a little scary.) When the phone starts up again, when it asks for your Google account, you instead enter an email address and password for your newly Google-hosted email system.
The phone synchronizes its contact list, calendar and email with what’s on Google’s servers and voilà! The Android is now ready to do your bidding.

Tech

Installing Ubuntu

I don’t really know why I waited until so late in the day – or early in the morning – to do it (at least in part it was because I was meeting a friend for late dinner at 8:00), but about a year after installing Xandros on an old Compaq box and never getting back to it, I decided to dump Xandros and install Ubuntu in it’s place.
Getting the WET54G wireless bridge set up last weekend was a three-hour process, and also a subject for another day. For now, the most important tip is that the machine you’re using to set it up needs to be set to an address on the 192.168.1.0 network. If you want to set the bridge up by hand instead of using the “Quick Setup” disk, you need to use your browser to connect to 192.168.1.226. UserId and Password are both “Admin” (they’re CaSe seNsitIVe by the way).
I don’t have any great amount of experience with any Linux distribution (or with Linux at all really), but I’ve been wanting to add Linux to my pool of knowledge for a while. There wasn’t any one powerful reason to switch distributions, except that a year ago I couldn’t get an updated version of Firefox to install on Xandros (in fact, I even managed to wipe out the old version) and when I used the Xandros management software to do an update this evening, the most recent version was 1.5. (Current version for Windows is 2.0.0.11.)
For all I know, installing the most recent of Xandros would have given me the current Firefox and maybe the ability to run SETI@Home too, but Ubuntu’s been getting a lot of buzz recently and since I’m a newbie, I’m going to want to be find help easily. If I’m going to install a new distribution, I may as well go with the crowd for now. (Please don’t leave me a zillion comments saying, “Oh, you should have used distro-X instead, it’s much easier. I’m sure each distribution has its own particular charms. I’m happy enough for now.)
My first ever boot from a live CD was an interesting experience. I’d already set the machine to boot from CD, so after switching it on, all I had to do was reboot and let it go. My CD drive is a bit noisy and for a while it sounded like there was a cow mooing in the spare bedroom.
Once the system came up, I was presented with about seven different menu choices. After a few dubious experiments with the memory test and such, I finally chose the default Setup/Install option and let it fly.
When the system stopped mooing again (I may need to rename that machine to “Bossy”; too bad it’s not a Gateway. 🙂 ) my screen was divided into vertical sections divided by flashing/jumping/irritating lines. After playing with the menu bar at the top of the page, I found the “Resolution” tool under preferences and dropped both the resolution and the refresh rate by one notch each, this made the CRT much happier and no doubt saved me from a migraine.
The screen I was presented with turned out to be a functional Linux desktop. A working email client, Firefox 2.0.something, Open Office, and even a few games. (It has Suduko — Dad will enjoy discovering that.) Along with the menu at the top (all the basic system utilities), there were two icons on the desktop. I’m not really sure what to make of the “Examples” folder, though the musical clips were nice enough. After poking around for a bit, I double-clicked the “Install” icon.
The installation program seems simple enough. Seven prompts for things like your time zone, how much of the hard drive to use for Linux, and information for the main user account and then the system starts whirring away, writing stuff to the hard drive so it will run faster. (The Live CD is a nice idea, but aside from the mooing, it’s slow.)
The install is still running, probably due to the age of the hardware as much as anything else (PIII with 256 MB of RAM and a 120 GB drive) so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out how it all went. I’m a little concerned that the main user account created during the install is going to turn out to be running with administrative privileges, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it (At least I know enough to be concerned about that sort of stuff).
In the meantime, I’m going to let Bossy keep mooing while I go and get some sleep.