Windows Vista and PCLinuxOS

I will be starting some IT support for a small company soon that have Vista on a couple of their PCs. So I decided it is time to go for it and install it on my laptop, so I can begin to get familiar with it. I also want to play with PCLinuxOS properly (by installing rather than just using the live CD). I have some old-ish Windows apps though so I want to keep XP too.

This thread will list the steps I did, what worked and what didn't etc. I only started yesterday and have some way to go yet.

My new(ish) laptop came with Vista Home Premium so it can obviously run it OK. It is a Dell Inspiron 640m with a Centrino Duo 1.83GHz (dual core) CPU, 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard disk. So plenty of space for all the partitions I will need. It has Intel graphics and Intel wireless.

When I first got it I wiped the drive (apart from the small FAT partition for Dell Diags which I left) and created a 40GB partition for Windows XP Pro and a 110-ish-GB (the remainder) partition for documents. Both were NTFS.

The first job was to delete all unnecessary clutter and uninstall a couple of unwanted programs, then back up both partitions with Acronis TrueImage. I moved the backups to our file server.

Then yesterday I installed Partition Magic and made the following changes:

• Documents drive converted to FAT32, reduced to 40GB and moved up to leave a 40GB gap between it and the C: WinXP partition. The reason for FAT32 is because Linux cannot reliably write to NTFS partitions.
  
• A new 40GB NTFS partition created in the gap for Vista.
  
• This left around 30GB unused at the end. I was going to leave it at that and let Linux have the spare space but then realised that with Dell Diags, WinXP, WinVista and Documents I had four primary partitions (the maximum). So I converted Documents to an extended partition, and made the extended bit (but not the documents partition) fill the rest of the drive. So there is space in the extended bit at the end for Linux. Hopefully it'll be happy up there.

With Vista installed the partitioning is like this...

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With that done it was time to reboot with the Vista CD loaded and get it installed. It wanted to do a custom install anyway (because Vista Home Premium cannot be an upgrade for XP Pro), so I told it to install in the partition I had prepared for it. This all went with no problems, and resulted in a dual-boot arrangement with a menu at startup for choosing between "Vista" and "Previous Windows Version" (I want to rename that later). Both versions ran OK. My documents partition is D: on XP and E: on Vista but that's not a big deal.

One of the first things I did in Vista was to turn off the "User Account Control" as the stupid messages are very annoying. I also turned off most of the sliding and fading effects which made it feel much more responsive (I do this with XP too).

The Dell Resource CD-ROM installed but would not run due to incorrectly registered MSCOMCTL.OCX. The solution, after wasting some time on the Dell forums, was to unregister then register this and another Active-X control.... I have no idea why. Anyway with that fixed I could install the various drivers and Dell utilities.

I ran the performance thing which says I have a base performance index of 3.1 (the graphics being the lowest).

View attachment 305

I then installed NOD32 anti-virus, then let Windows onto the Internet to get the relevant Windows updates. It needed about 85MB of them. MS Office 2007 was installed next, followed by Roxio.

I am now in the process of installing the software I normally use. So far everything has installed and runs with no problems, however there are some oldies to install tomorrow (CorelDraw 7, Dreamweaver 4 and Visual Basic 6) which could be interesting. Firefox and Thunderbird are running fine, as expected. My mail is stored on the documents partition so Thunderbird on XP and Vista can access it.

So that's where I am currently.......

 

PCLinuxOS can read but not write NTFS. I guess it's the same thing but with write disabled, as it's been known to be rather iffy due to being reverse engineered. Going for FAT32 for the documents partition and leaving it read-only for NTFS should be fine (plus Linux or me fumbling cannot then harm the Windows installations).

I always use a separate documents partition anyway (easier for backing up), so the only difference is that it is FAT32 instead of NTFS which from a user point of view is irrelevant.

 

I have been installing software this evening, and it has gone surprisingly well.

• CorelDraw 7 (vector and photo editor from 1998) works file.
• Dreamweaver 4 (website development package from 2000) works fine though it has Vista style borders round all the floaters which makes them bigger. I haven't tried its FTPing facility yet, but that's flaky anyway.
• Visual Basic 6 (programming language from around 1999) generally works OK though some of the ActiveX controls haven't registered correctly. They need to be unregistered and reregistered using regsvr32 from the command prompt in the Windows\System32 folder.
• Microsoft Classic Board Games, Microsoft Bicycle Card Games and Microsoft Bicycle Board Games all install and work fine. The Bicycle ones complain at the beginning of the installer that the processor is below the minimum 133MHz requirement but lets you go on anyway.
• Second Copy 7.0 (file synchronising utility) didn't work properly (menus slow and unable to select folders) but there is an update to 7.1 on the website which works fine.
• PDFCreator does not work. The installer says it's the wrong version, and if I use the compatibility option to get past that and install it, printing to it gives a Windows error. No newer versions available (there is a $150 bounty offered on the website for whoever can get it to work on Vista). It's open source so who knows what'll happen there.
• CoolEdit 2000 (audio editing program from.... 2000!) works fine.
• UltraEdit 10.2 (programmer's text editor) installs and works fine. This was a surprise as it will not install on XP if IE7 is installed so I expected problems as Vista has IE7 by default. Version 10.2 is from 2004 and the latest version offers nothing new useful to me.

Most of the other stuff I installed is reasonably recent and does claim to be Vista compatible on the relevant websites.

I installed a utility called EasyBCD which allows the boot menu to be edited. So instead of "Previous Version of Windows" it now says "Microsoft Windows XP". This also allows Linux to be added to the boot menu, which could be useful in due course.

Everything has been done with an administrator level login and "User Account Control" (UAC) turned off. From web searches it is necessary to turn off UAC when installing Visual Basic 6 or applications created with it. I intend to leave UAC off anyway, as it's more annoying than useful.

Now I am going to just use it for the rest of the week (I do have some work to get on with...) and then probably try to install PCLinuxOS at the weekend.

 

I haven't installed Linux yet, or done that much more with the Vista installation other than installing a few more bits and pieces.

I tried enabling User Access Control again but this caused problems with Visual Basic, Dreamweaver and CorelDraw. VB complained that it could not access the registry while DW and Corel complained that they could not access files. Running those programs as administrator (a right-click option) solves some of the problems but causes others instead.

The way UAC works is that for administrators it actually does most Windows stuff with user-level permissions and asks if it needs to step up to administrator level for certain things. With it turned off everything is run with administrator permissions (so the same as running XP as administrator or running Linux as root).

However if you are using older apps, especially those dating from the Windows 95/98 era, there seems to be no other option. I have always run XP as administrator and managed to avoid any virus/spyware/whatever issues (a decent anti-virus/anti-spyware program like NOD32 is essential, as is a router with a firewall) so it's an acceptable risk to me.

UAC is a good idea, and on a system with recent applications it should be fine. It is not as well done as the equivalent functionality in Ubuntu (and probably other) Linux though, which is probably where the general idea came from. There needs to be some improvement to the way older applications are handled. Otherwise users will just turn it off, and also turn off Security Center alerts to stop being nagged, which results in insecure systems.

 

I tried to install PCLinuxOS this evening but it got in a mess with the drive partitioning. It tried to create three more primary partitions which of course is not possible, then froze.

Fortunately I could boot into Vista and delete the rubbish partitions it had tried to make.

I don't know where to go from here so I will forget it for now. When I have more time I will see if there is some info on their forums.

 

A suggestion from the forums was to create the partitions in WinXP using Partition Magic then choose the option to install to existing partitions. That worked but the system kept freezing and the graphics would not work at the native resolution of the display. So I gave up with PCLinuxOS, restored the Vista boot manager and deleted the Linux partitions.

I have now installed Ubuntu 7.10 instead. That recognised all the hardware, including the Intel wireless network card (support in the kernal apparently), has the correct screen resolution, working sound and even the extra buttons for volume and brightness etc work with screen graphics. It probably helps that Dell are installing Ubuntu on some of their machines, so hardware support should be good (my PC is a Dell Inspiron 640m).

Time to look around the repositories for some interesting software now. The first thing to go on will be Thunderbird as I don't like Evolution.

 

I am currently arguing with the Firefox dictionary. It seems to have the US English one installed by default and I cannot find how to remove it. I have installed the British English one but it still thinks "colour" is wrong and "color" is correct.

 

Sorted that one. I uninstalled the various en-us and en-za dictionaries (with the package management thing), leaving just the en-gb ones, and it now works as it should.

That's a bit of an omission in the Ubuntu installer though. Surely if you select a UK keyboard layout and timezone it should install UK dictionaries and not US dictionaries?