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In the further adventures of the Ubuntu 9.04 desktop in the workplace, the crabby engineer has installed Thunderbird 2.0 and has it connecting to the corpulent (corporate, whatever!) Exchange server. I tried Evolution in the Ubuntu 9.04 distro and was deeply disappointed. I could not get it to work at all. I was looking forward to a "lookOut!" connection with the calender, company address book etc, without actually having to use "lookOut!".

Since Thunderbird is a IMAP/POP client, its going out to the intranet and then back to the Internet connection on our Exchange Server, so I run a secure connection. We have a number of employees that are located all around the world so web access is necessary. I also get to take advantage of the spam filter since the IT guys have it set to NOT distribute spam to outside remotely logged on connections. Nice. My inbox is so nice and tidy now. Even though Thunderbird is using a POP connection, Exchange lets me keep folders on the server and local folders on Ubuntu without any complaints at all.

I was a little worried about compatibility but it seems to work without any complaint except one. I get a message on every refresh or connection that the server security license is not licensed to the Exchange Server. Yes that is true but even when I set Thunderbird to accept the license as a permanent exception, it pops the warning up every time. What really is the problem is that the license does not mention or cover the web connection I am using to get to the server, just the inside connections. So this message is popping up for all of our Internet connected employees as well. When I have some time I'll figure out how to deep-six the security pop-up on this one single connection.

Oh well. Its just another click. Working with Visaster has really inured me to the potential security threats represented by the pop-ups. (Not!) So far I haven't yet gotten nailed by a spoof pop-up (knock on my head!). I try to check my email when I can stay focused on it and not be distracted so I'll not just blindly click-through. However, I'm only sure about myself, not the other company employees. A number of them are situated where they have to use public Wifi or 3G connections to get to the Internet. Hopefully we won't get trashed by something dropped onto the Exchange Server by a remotely connected employee or a wireless man-in-the-middle.

One of the future IT fantasies would be a completely secure email system such that you could trust the connection, the message and the ID of the guy sending you the email. And likewise for him as well. For employees, using a variation of VPN or some secure tunneling technique takes care of the connection security issues but doesn't necessarily lend itself to expansion beyond the corporate structure. Vendors, sales reps, FAE's etc are a lot of the people I communicate with daily and for them there is no easy answer to increase security on email.

If I had a wish, it would be for the Internet gurus out there to invent a really secure email service and protocol that could be used for managed connections. Something besides set email filters to prevent unwanted email from getting dropped on your desktop. I could handle it if there was a way to automatically negotiate with the remote server and give them a secure keycode or token to allow an encrypted transmission to come through. PGP is good but its not automatic.

The email clients could have maybe four levels of security. SPAM or JUNK, the lowest could be just dumped daily if convenient. Unmanaged, would be the advertising that is of some use and maybe job related. Managed would be the email you wanted to get from vendors and the like and it would have the security features enabled. Corporate would be the company originated email and the most secure.

Another nice feature would be a way to dump forwarded email with spiritual, religious, and/or schmaltzy sentiments back to the originator AND all the people that forwarded it to the hundreds or thousands that got it before you did. (I did say it was a crabby engineer, right?)

Just some ideas.

I finally had my fill of Visaster on my office desktop. The final kick in the teeth delivered by Visaster was a document that flat out disappeared while I was attempting to move it to a remote shared drive. Explorer did its typical "white-out" and then locked up the desktop and the system had to be power cycled to get responses from the keyboard or mouse.

I got permission from the IT department to go back to doing my own IT admin work. I went into Visaster's Disk Manager and shrunk the third partition (D:) on the 640 GB drive. That gave me about 300 GB of open drive space. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and set all 3 of the Linux partitions manually. 80GB for /, an 8GB swap space (overkill) and the rest for /Home. I set them up for ext3. So now I have a dual boot system. Visaster and Ubuntu, with Ubuntu as default. As I manage to copy project and doc files from the NTFS D drive to /Home, I'll shrink it further.

A definite upgrade for Visaster is Ubuntu 9.04 on the same hardware. Eventually I'll be Visaster-free at work like I am at home.

Open Office 3.0 works fine for what I have to do. FireFox of any version is far superior to Internet Exploder 6, 7 and especially version 8 for access to the crappy commercial wiki I've described before.

While working on the Visaster I discovered something interesting and unexpected. This being a DELL system, there are 3 partitions setup for Visaster, a hidden DELL repair partition of 60 odd megabytes, the C and D NTFS drives. All three of them are primary partitions. The three Linux partitions are primary partitions as well. MS DOS, 16 & 32 bit Windows all have a limit of 4 primary partitions on a drive. But this one has a total of 6 primary partitions and Grub seems to run all of it just fine. Nice.

This particular system has an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.8 GHz with 4GB of DDR2 RAM so its no slouch. Ubuntu 9.04 on it has done some pretty things I hadn't seen before. Application windows open and close with fades in and out with the panel moving towards and away from the user. Transparency of the task bar and application bars are independently controllable.

Another desktop feature I have not seen before is related to the mouse. If you push the mouse hard over to the right, it shoves the desktop to the left so suddenly it appears as if your desktop is twice as wide as the display (1600 x 1200 turns into 3200 x 1200). The desktop space actually is twice as wide, the setting for the video controller becomes a sliding "window" on the desktop. I suppose its just a variation of the virtual desktop feature but it was totally unexpected and a cool effect! You could park an application window off the right hand side of the screen totally out of sight. It also allows for a mid-range setting so that the "display" window is centered on the desktop range.

Ubuntu 9.04 definitely picks up some significant “snap” with a high power processor. I was impressed, as far as I'm concerned it beats Visaster SP2.

Compact Flashes are supposed to be but are not created equal.

Years ago SanDisk wrote the specification for the Compact Flash form factor, the IDE compatibility, and other features of the standard. One of the specifications was the ability to boot up at least from a FAT formatted volume on the flash. Since then they have become excellent storage media for embedded computers and dedicated special purpose systems.

I've written elsewhere on this site about Compact Flashes used as IDE/PATA hard drive substitutes. Some experiments or at the very least let's call it experiences have given me some heartburn because the CF standard, although fairly specific, may have some holes. Or at least some manufacturers aren't keeping close tabs on how their systems are performing at the IDE interface. That goes for both the board manufacturers and the CF manufacturers.

Some of the most recent Compact Flashes when combined with industrial single board computers (SBC) can display some issues. The latest industrial compact flashes are much faster than their predecessors. Current ones are comparable to ATA33 or ATA66 speed for a standard hard drive. Differences in timing between the Compact Flash and the IDE interface seem to cause problems most frequently when the BIOS is in control of the UDMA capabilities programmed into most CPU boards. That's usually the “Auto” mode for the IDE port BIOS parameters.

The symptoms on a couple SBC's was that the system would get through the 16 bit portion of the boot up (Windows Flag logo – ntldr) and during the hand-off to the 32 bit portion (blue desktop, no mouse cursor - ntkernal) it would throw out a BSOD with a stop code of 7B.

Similar issues have been experienced before by OEMs with standard 3 1/2” format hard drives at various times.

I haven't had time yet to try out the new high speed CF's with any of the standard Linux distributions. The trick with Windows XP Embedded is to turn the UDMA off before the new system image goes through its initial configuration boot-up with a newly compiled operating system image. UDMA is then turned on before the next boot-up. The CF seems to work fine but the read speed is slower than it is in later versions of the same SBC. The older slower versions of the board will boot to the Windows desktop in 45 seconds and the newer and faster versions of the board will boot in 35 seconds.

I would expect similar performance with Linux but we'll see.

(My attempt at writing a tabloid headline.)

A Very Interesting Microsoft event just occurred. Microsoft is offering at a deep discount and through direct retail sale their FUTURE mainstay product. Since I deliberately avoid paying attention to Microsoft outside of office hours, I don't remember if they've ever done that before. Not quite a going-out-of-business sale but certainly one that ought to p.o. a number of the big computer manufacturers.

They aren't doing it in a small way either. Microsoft.com has the announcement taking up about a third of the top of the page. The expiration date of the deal though is only found in the small print on another page detailing pre-sales.

Win 7 Home at $49 US is a loss-leader for sure. It will cover the price to the OEMs, shipping & handling and their margin whatever it is. That is going to eat into Visaster sales between now and past Opening Day sales for DELL, HP etc. My guess is that Microsoft has already covered their backside with the major OEMs by offering to pay them part of the take of the pre-sales. I would suggest they do it as an apportioned measure of the opening week's worth of sales. (Since I'm offering free business advice! Ha!) By the end of the first week everybody will have forgotten the pre-sales.

Offering to hand out copies of Win7 to purchasers of new Visaster equipped systems is also part of this deal.

Why buy a new computer if you can put the deeply discounted Win 7 DVD on your old Visaster hardware? This deal though only appeals to power users, geeks and tech-savvy early adopters. (Was that redundant?)

Maybe they think they can generate some pre-opening chatter especially from the ones who down-loaded the RC.

I think Microsoft is running a little scared. They want to jazz the numbers with the pre-sales counts added to the numbers for the opening day stats like a movie opening up on a weekend. In fact Oct 22 is a Thursday, the traditional Movie Opening day in the US.

In some ways I feel like Microsoft is trying to do everything it can to erase the bad ju-ju they got with Visaster. Maybe this time they won't need to run those idiotic "Mojave" and Seinfeld ads! If we get lucky, maybe the ads will be even worse!

Update:

Ran across an ad on Office Depot's website selling Win 7. Looks like they've pulled out all the stops and the marketing is going full blast. Amazon, Office Max and practically everybody is selling Win 7.

Considering that the price of a 4GB USB flash drive has been as low as 5 dollars on close-out specials, financially it wouldn't make sense UNLESS Microsoft decides to go into the Flash RAM business. The full Win 7 Ultra install DVD is 3.9GB large. Even stripped down it will be better than 2 GB so 4GB sounds like the right size for the Win7 USB Flash drive.

The price per Win 7 Starter license I was seeing for netbooks was around $3 each license in volume. That would mean the price of USB flash drives need to be much lower than that to make it possible to do economically.

Then think about what it would take to make a mass assembly line operation to clone the image onto USB flash drives thousands or millions of times! I suppose you could use something like Ghost to make 128 copies at a time through a massively wicked USB "router". The time it would take to plug in and out all the USB flash drives would be tremendous!

Actually its been done sort of by SanDisk. They have a number of U3-based USB flash drives that have a "read-only" partition that plays like a CDR. When its up and running, the USB flash drive looks like 2 drives, a CDR and a HDD. It has some software on it that makes Windows XP Pro work better when it comes time to unmount the USB flash drive. Actually fairly nice.

I don't know how they are doing it. There is likely some sort of JTAG software interface hidden in "plain sight" connected to the USB signal pins. With special commands to special hidden registers, part of the drive is marked as read only.

If you delete the partitions you kill the U3 interface. If you are careful, the read-write partition can be formatted in NTFS and it coexists nicely with the U3 CD-ROM type partition.

I could see SanDisk turning out millions of Win7 USB flash disks on the U3 read-only "CDR"-like partition for Microsoft. But to do it for a price the netbook owners will be willing to pay, hmmm, I don't know about that.

I think most likely Microsoft is going to make the netbook owners that want it on their old netbooks eat the price. It probably won't be available in anything other than download ISO form. Buy your own USB drive. Buy the download on Shop Microsoft. Copy the image over to the Flash. Use an updated tool based on ufdprep.exe to prep the flash drive. It will have a file converter program that will open enough of the image to mount a bootstrap loader on the netbook and then mount and install the ISO onto the system hard drive or internal flash drive or SSD. (Sounds like a job for a really small install of Linux!)

Don't expect this function above to be available until late in the year until after the retailers get an idea how netbook sales with Win 7 pre-installed are doing. Microsoft will think of the USB based install to be a loss-leader, a way to get users hooked on Windows 7 so they'll buy it pre-installed on their next computer or as shrink-wrap for their old desktops or regular laptops. That's what the Win7 RC is by the way, a form of digital "crack" to get the neighborhood geeks all hooked. Call it Windows 7 Express!

Its prettier than XP Pro but not faster. It is definitely better than Vista on substantial hardware, like a dual core CPU with 4 GB of RAM.

I have no clue how well it will work stripped down enough to work on a netbook. I've already had my taste of "Windows-7-crack". Would I buy it?

No.