Windows

by Kulbir Saini on Adobe, Hardware, Laptop, Linux, News

Humour: Ubuntu is Costlier than Microsoft Windows XP

Dell started selling their new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 series yesterday as informed by slashdot article. Lately I have been looking for a mobile solution which should be easy to carry and have enough computing power to meet my expectation. I liked the SSD concept replacing the mechanical hard disk. I just moved over to Dell website and tried configuring one for myself (go here to configure them yourself). I am an open source addict but I am not an Ubuntu fan but still going with ubuntu sounds better than going with M$ stuff. So, started configuring the Ubuntu machine and pushed everything (main memory, hard disk and other components) to maximum. A few minutes later I realized that the Ubuntu model’s price is more than the equivalent config with M$ Windows.

Below is a table comparing Windows XP and Ubuntu model of Dell Inspiron Mini 9 series. The differences are highlighted in red color.

Ubuntu 8.04
Microsoft Windows XP Home Premium
$494
$479
My Components
Obsidian Black
Obsidian Black
Mini OS powered by Ubuntu 8.04
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
1GB DDR2 at 533MHz
1GB DDR2 at 533MHz
16GB Solid State Drive
16GB Solid State Drive
Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 capability
Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 capability
Integrated 1.3M Pixel Webcam
Integrated 1.3M Pixel Webcam
My Service
1Yr Ltd Warranty and Mail-In Service
1Yr Ltd Warranty and Mail-In Service
Also Includes
Intel® Atom Processor® N270 (1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB/512K cache) Intel® Atom Processor® N270 (1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB/512K cache)
Glossy 8.9 inch LED display (1024X600)
Glossy 8.9 inch LED display (1024X600)
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
Wireless 802.11g Mini Card
Wireless 802.11g Mini Card
32WHr Battery (4 cell)
32WHr Battery (4 cell)
Base LCD Assembly
Base LCD Assembly
Base LCD Assembly in Black
Base LCD Assembly in Black
No Installation
No Installation
Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 8.1, English
McAfee SecurityCenter 30-day Trial
Microsoft Works 9 DOES NOT INCLUDE MS WORD
No ISP requested

According to the above table Ubuntu alone is costlier than Genuine Microsoft Windows XP Home Premium + Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1 English + McAfee SecurityCenter 30-day Trial + Microsoft Works 9 (MS Word Excluded). I am not sure if Dell is trying to promote Microsoft by selling Windows XP model at a lower price or they are generating more revenues for Ubuntu by selling it at a higher price or they are just fooling the customers. Below are the picture proofs if Dell changes the prices.

Inspiron Ubuntu

Inspiron Windows

 
by Kulbir Saini on Drivers, Games, Hard Disk, Hardware, Linux

Bye Bye Windows

A ruff day again … but a day I think I’ll remember for long or may be forever … the day of change … the day you grow up and take decision not to mess up your life anymore …

well, ORB posted some pics of a game here (intranet link) and I just asked about the minimum hardware configuration for running the game. His reply was “minimum requirements for u is first start using windows“. well, I use linux most of the times but I have windows xp as well, though sitting idle on my hdd. I didn’t a expect a comment like that.

As I am leaving for home on 10th of this month, I switched to windows. I started writing some data onto DVDs for taking them along with me. While writing the first DVD, it failed at 95%. Suddenly, I got an idea that I would take my hard disk instead of writing the DVDs this time. I’ll buy a SATA to USB converter and transfer the data through USB. So, started collecting the data. While downloading a movie from some ftp, a virus came over and attacked my pc. Strange virus!!! whenever I open any window with title having any of the words task manager, antivirus, virus, norton, symantec, mcaffee etc., it just minimize the window and kill the process immediately. ohh !!! I tried all the ways I know or I could have, but in vain.

So, thought of formatting my windows partition and reinstall the windows. Booted from the xp cd and …. and black screen …. ohh god … i have got this SATA-II hdd. shit!!! Technology is just to fool humans not to help in the real sense. The windows xp doesn’t install on sata hard disks.

To get through, I had two ways … either I go by the long, irritating way of patching the xp iso with sata drivers or format the entire hdd and create one single partition using Partition Magic and then install the xp. Tried patching first … long long process … gave up early … and there is not point in formatting the entire hdd for the crappy os. The best thing is that Fedora 7 is out with a great support for virtualization.

So, I have finally decided to kick windows out of my hdd forever or as long as possible and keep only Fedora. I will really miss AOE but I can’t live with the threats anymore.

I remember a line from one of our English books “Calamity will come and teach them by torture.”. I think this is going to happen to everyone sometime down the line.

So, from now on, I am totally free and secure.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, Drivers, Fedora, Hacks, Hardware, HowTo, Installation, Internet, Ndiswrapper, Wireless

How To: Configure Wireless with Ralink (RT2500) Level One WNC 0301 in Fedora Core 4

Yesterday after a lot of trials with Fedora Core 5 to activate my wireless LAN card, I switched to Fedora Core 4, which looked much more stable than FC5. Actually with FC5, I mainly faced problems with gui , my mouse which is Microsoft USB mouse and my wlan card which is level one Ralink RT2500. In FC5, I tried both with ndiswrapper and madwifi but nothing worked out for me. Also my mouse was not working well. I can click things but the pointer was not visible like microsoft gave me a invisible mouse or this microsoft mouse don’t want to work with Linux. After installing FC4, I felt very comfortable with guis and my mouse. They worked fine. But now there were two problems. One is that FC4 was not able to detect my soundcard and the wlan was not working again. Anyway soundcard is not a big problem, as it worked in FC5, I’ll make it work with some up-gradation or things like that. But the major problem is wlan. And here goes the methods which I tried to activate my wlan card.

Method 1. With rpms

I downloaded these rpms

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madwifi-0.9.4.12-16.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm
madwifi-kmdl-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-0.9.4.12-16.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm
madwifi-hal-kmdl-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4smp-0.9.6.0-20.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm

from the site atrpms and tried installing them but they failed the dependency /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4 , then i tried to find this rpm everywhere on google , rpmfind etc …. but I could not find it. Then I installed it with –nodeps option and configured according to the data given here .
But in vain.

Method 2. With ndiswrapper using Microsoft Windows XP drivers

I downloaded the ndiswrapper-1.16 from sourceforge.
I untarred it and used these commands.

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make uninstall
make
make install

Please don’t forget to the read the INSTALL and README files in the ndiswrapper-1.* directory. Then I inserted my LAN card driver cd for XP and copied the drivers directory which contains .inf and .sys files to my root directory. Then I used the commands .

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ndiswrapper -i Rt2500.INF
ndiswrapper -l
modprobe ndiswrapper
iwconfig "wlan0" key open "wep 128 bit hex key" ESSID "IIIT WLAN"
dhclient wlan0

I ran all this command and I am very happy to say that wireless LAN did not work. 🙂 Then I ran this command

touch /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

and then edited this file. I entered all the data suggested here except that second line I wrote

DEVICE=wlan0

OK. Then i ran

neat

and edited the properties of wlan device by double clicking it and gave the 26 letters wlan key there and activated the device and it worked 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on HowTo, Linux, Remote Desktop

How To: Remote Desktop to Windows Machine from Linux

If you know IP of a windows system and also you have a username and password. Then you can easily work in windows environment of that system from a Linux desktop provided that the remote system is switched on and is booted in windows. Also no one is logged in on that pc because only one person can access the pc at a time through this procedure.

There is a simple command u can launch from a linux terminal and that is..

[kulbirsaini@localhost ~] rdesktop -f  [IP address of the remote system]   [Enter]

e.g

[kulbirsaini@localhost ~] rdesktop -f 222.36.226.30 [Enter]

The full screen mode will appear and will ask for your username and password. Enter your password and experience that u r working in windows…

To return to the Linux press [ctrl-alt-enter] or go to the start menu and click disconnect. If this doesn’t work and you get some errors. Then you have to do some setting on the pc you want to access. Go to the pc and boot in windows and login as privileged user who has administrative privileges. Now click start and open my computer and go one directory up. Now right click on the my computer icon and click on properties. A new window will appear and on that window click remote and make sure that there is tick mark on the option “Allow users to connect remotely.”