Update on chkdsk wiping out permissions on folders

After spending considerable time with Microsoft on the phone and an ezassist session on the server in question this is what I found out. There are two hotfixes available. One for W23k servers with SP1 and one for W23k servers with SP2. You must apply these hot fixes and reboot the server BEFORE you run chkdsk on any volumes. There are no easy ways to replace the permissions on the user folders once the damage is done. Option A is the GUI routine where you right click on the user folder and readd the users or global groups and then select to push to all files and folders. Option 2 is to use a xcacls.vbs script to run lcacls.exe and associated commands to push the permissions out to each file and folder. If you need to apply global changes only to a group of folders you can go to the top root folder and make your changes and then select inheritance for all sub folders and files under the root. That will not work for individual folder security permission needs which is much more granular.

I dodged a bullet with regards to replacing the security permissions on my file server today. Since the office is closed and no one is accessing the server or making changes to data I was able to revert the E volume back to 12/26/07 at 5 am via the Volume Shadow Copy. It took some time for this to happen but once it was complete and I rebooted the server I spot checked several folders and everything was back to where it was before I ran chkdsk and accidentally stripped out the permissions. If this had been a normal work day and all the users had been making changes to their data or adding data to their user directories then I would have been forced to go the lcacls.vbs route or the manual point and click GUI routine to replace the permissions. I can not begin to tell you how much fun that is.

chkdsk disaster on W2k3 NTFS partition

In October of this year I ran Chkdsk on a volume on one of my W2k3 servers. I ran this utility because we had evidence of file or folder corruption on that particular user share. I was rewarded for my actions by chkdsk removing ALL the security permissions on every single folder. Needless to say I was a huge hit with the rest of the server support team who wound up helping me to replace all the security permissions on these folders so that folks could access their data. In four days we got this accomplished. We did our research and according to Microsoft knowledgebase articles this was something that happens to Windows 2000 servers. No where did we see where Windows 2003 servers with SP1 were supposed to be susceptible to this type of problem. We did find an obscure article that hinted that there was an NTFS related file that SP2 would update that would keep this from happening. Fast forward to December and this same server is now updated with SP2 and all of the Microsoft Updates that are available for Windows 2003 Standard Edition. We are in the midst of Christmas holidays and everyone other than us unlucky contractors are out doing other things than work. I figured this was a wonderful opportunity to let chkdsk do its magic and fix whatever data corruption that might be on the user share of this server. I run chkdsk with the /f switch so it dismounts the volume and off to the races it goes. The volume is close to 1.5 TB in size so it takes several hours to do. Phase 1 and 2 go along just fine with nothing being reported back to the screen as an error. Phase 3 checks the indexes and that is when I got the dreaded “replacing invalid security id with default security id for file (numbers). Needless to say I was not really excited about the prospect of having to manually replace the permissions on all these folders. I called my boss, told her the problem and she authorized me to call Microsoft and get paid support. I am hoping that they can identify the problem for us so that I can document it and make sure it never happens again on our hundreds of other servers and that they can provide me with a script from AD that will allow me to replace the permissions with the correct permissions from the command line. I will let you know what I find out when the dust settles and things are fixed.

Vista Problems

Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue by ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes -- I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft.

I subscribe to the ItsVista newsletter/blog and when I saw this I could relate to the PAIN that some of these problems have caused all of us. I have been using Vista every since the first beta release and I must say that the OS is different and takes some getting used to. I am currently using Vista Ultimate in a networking environment at work. There are two things I dont like specificially about Vista in a LAN environment.

A. you cant launch a program with the RUN AS option

B. Copying data to and from a network share takes forever

In XP Pro you can launch an application by right clicking on the icon and selecting Run As which allows you to select a domain admin account or system account with administrative rights higher than the current credentials that you are logged on to the domain with. The only way I can do network administration from my Vista box is to use a program called Hyena which allows me to sign on to a server individually with whatever credentials that I want.

As for copying data this is just rediculous. I have a friend who has experienced a laptop crash which is partly hardware and partly software related. I plan on disecting the laptop so that I can visually inspect the motherboard and other things attached to it to see if I can find out why it is overheating. In the interim I decided that I would bring the hard drive to work with me and get the data off of it.

I utilized a nifty little USB hard drive adapter that I used to plug the laptop hard drive into and copied all the data from the hard drive to my XP workstation. My Vista workstation did not know what to do with the new device. Welcome to the wonderful world of driver hell. I moved the device over to the XP machine and XP recongized that I have a external usb hard drive attached to the system. I copied the 7.3 gb of data over to my XP machine hard drive and then I copied it over to my user share on the network.

This is where the fun begins folks. I started this mess around 10 am this morning and figured I would just work on this inbetween my other work tasks today. I figured I would have it done pretty quickly. Never assume that a computer related task will happen quickly and without any problems. I always find myself assuming that and then wind up spending way more time than expected. I tried to copy the data from my network share to a folder on my Vista machine and after Vista estimated the time it would take it came up with 5 days and 2 hours to move 7 gb of data. I looked at the bit rate the data was moving and it was fluctuating around 25 to 30 kb per second. My Vista box is a Dell with dual core processor at 3.2 ghz and 2 gb of ram. I have a 160 gb hard drive plus network storage. I have a race horse under the hood folks and that does not matter. My nic is a gb ethernet and I have a GB ethernet connection to the switch. There is no way this connection should grind to a hault like this.

The downside to this nightmare is that the DVD writer is on the Vista machine and the XP machine is my dual boot windoze/linux box that does not even have a cdr writer on it. That means that I have to burn the DVD on the Vista machine. I finally got smart and totally bypassed the gui interface and went to the command line interface. I used xcopy to copy from the network share to my backup directory on the hard drive. I started the process , locked down the workstation and went to lunch. Once I came back from lunc the data had been transferred. I have tried several times to burn the data from the windoze explorer to a dvd ram disk with little to no luck. My next and final attempt at this is to use a DVD burning program called BurnFree which is ad driven freeware for copying dvd movies on Vista OS. If that does not work I will be forced to cart the data on an external USB hard disk to my friend.

During my research on the Net I did find some TCP settings to muck with as well as some system services that could supposedly be turned off and give me some more network speed. I tried all of the suggestions but none of them did the trick thus far. Due to time constraints in writing this I dont have time to give you all the gory details but if you do a Google search you will see lots of conversation going on about this problem.

BAD VISTA. You dont play well on the LAN... LOL

BlackBerry Pearl - Small, Smart and Stylish. Explore The New BlackBerry Smartphone

I have always been intrigued with "Crackberry" devices.  Oh, yeah, I meant to say I have always been intrigued with Blackberry data devices.  I call Blackberry devices "Crackberry" devices because the folks  that own them always seem to be fiddling with them no matter where they might be.  

Once upon a time the cell phone was this large black leather bag that weighed 25 lbs and took up the front passenger seat of your car.  Cellular telephones disconnected us from land line telephones and gave us a new freedom while being mobile.  We could be on the road and still communicate with loved ones, co workers, vendors and clients.  Never in our wildest dreams did we dream that the telephone that used to be solely an audio voice device would turn into so much more. 

The RIM blackberry's primary feature that attracts so much attention is the ability to send and receive corporate and pop3 e-mail.  Any business can install a Blackberry Enterprise server and seamlessly integrate the business e-mail communications and send and receive this e-mail on the Blackberry device.  If the Blackberry Enterprise Server is too costly of a solution you can download a Blackberry redirector that integrates into Outlook and forwards whatever e-mails you want to your Blackberry account. 

I can also set up to ten e-mail accounts on my Blackberry Peal that will forward to my device and I also have my own Blackberry Email address that I can give others. 

One of the nice e-mail functionality that I love is the ability to filter out all of the e-mail or spam that I do not want to receive on my Blackberry device.   

Now that we have briefly touched on the e-mail functionality of Blackberry I would like to touch upon some of the unique characteristics of the Blackberry Pearl. 

• The Pearl is half the size of all the other Blackberry devices
• The Pearl is a Data device that combines telephone , e-mail and data services
• The Pearl features a very nice  Audio player
• The Pearl gives you Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk clients
• The Pearl has a micro SD port that allows you to increase your ability to save data such as music and pictures
• The Pearl has a very nice Digital Camera with flash
• The Pearl provides stereo headphones that allow you to listen to the Audio player as well as talk on your telephone. 
• The Pearl provides VAC or voice activated calling
• The Pearl comes with a mini USB data cable that utilizes the RIM desktop manager to synchronize your data.

Now that I have briefly touched on some of the features that stand out with regards to the Pearl I have a couple of comments about usability.  I like the ability to be on the bus listening to MP4's that  I loaded on the mini SD card.  I also like the ability of getting a phone call while listening to music and the music automatically being muted while I handle the call.  Once the call is ended the music continues. 

One of the biggest learning curves that I had to overcome was how to use the keyboard to tap out messages.  The keyboard is not a full QWERTY keyboard which means that it has keys (buttons) that combine two letters instead of one.  I really felt clumsy and frustrated trying to learn how to type using this keyboard. 

The first typing method is called "Multi tap" which means you find the key that has the letter you want and you tap either one time or twice depending on which order it appears on the button. 

The second typing method which is very difficult to wrap your brain around is called "Sure Type" .  If you have been typing for any length of time either on  a personal computer or doing text messaging on your cell phone you are used to pushing a button and inputting the appropriate letter, number or symbol. 

SureType technology works best if you just start hitting the keys where the letters are that you want to use to construct the words in your message.  As you type the SureType technology learns what you want to say by putting together different combinations of  letters that you chose from.  The longer you use this method the more accurate it gets.  Not only that but the SureType technology saves a custom word list so that when you type in a specific key combination it already knows what you want to type and completes it for you.  I have been very amazed at how well this actually works. 

Ok, what are you waiting for?  Go to your cellular provider and tell them you want to put your hands on one of these data devices and give it a test drive.  Be sure to click the link below this blog review to see a nice flash video of this device. 

 

BlackBerry Pearl - Small, Smart and Stylish. Explore The New BlackBerry Smartphone

Windows Live Writer Beta

I discovered Windows Live Writer Beta and I think I like it ok. It allows me to publish to multiple blogs or to choose which blog I want to publish to.  It not only supports native Windows Live Blogs but it supports other blog services such as Blogspot.  One of the unique functions of Windows Live Beta is that it logs on to your Blog account after you  give it access and it determines the blog format that you have selected and it downloads any typeface or fonts or graphics that you have in place so when you are publishing an article the WYSIWYG editor shows you exactly what the blog will look like.  Other products like this allow you to post text and  graphics to your blog but you have to preview what it actually looks like before you can publish it.  You can insert the following items as well.

• Hyperlink
• Picture
• Table
• map
• Tags

I am using this tool now to post this article to my Chief Blog.  Enjoy!

Windows Live Writer Beta

Data security software, Secure Windows logon; Disk encryption; Using a USB flash drive for logon; FREE download; FREE updates;

 I have been using Windows Vista Business and Ultimate for some time now.  All in all I have enjoyed using the software despite some of the learning curve and hardware/software hurdles to get here.  Then again being an I.T. professional  I am willing to go where most people do not dare to go.  I do not mind the words crash recovery and bleeding edge when it comes to computer technology. 

Identify theft is a buzz word both in personal finance circles as well as Information Technology.  Companies are coming to their senses and realizing that there are some very talented yet unscrupulous people who sit at home or at their cubicles at work and figure out ways to hack into Microsoft Windows and other  Operating Systems. 

More and more people are going mobile and carry around sensitive data.  No one wants anyone to have unauthorized access therefore Windows Vista could be a good choice with an OS with extra security built in.    Bitlocker Drive Encryption is one such security aware program that can encrypt your data. 

I subscribe to several Vista related RSS feeds including ITsVista and saw the article about ROHOS Logon key utilizing a USB drive.  USB drives are so cheap now you can carry around more drive space on your key ring than you could have put on some of the earlier hard drives.  One of the things that I hate to do is to constantly have to type in my password on my Windows Vista laptop.  I thought that the pricing matrix for this type of utility was very nice as well. 

Data security software, Secure Windows logon; Disk encryption; Using a USB flash drive for logon; FREE download; FREE updates;

Incompatible driver error in Vista with Roxio driver

Go to this link to fix your issue with Vista not liking the driver for Roxio. Early on when I first ran into this problem there was not a solution. That was several months ago. It is nice to NOT see that darn error popping up all the time now.



http://kb.roxio.com/content/kb/Creator/000131CR

Yes, I am a sucker for punishment. I figure that while I was playing musical OS's with my 40 gb hard drive on the Toshiba laptop that I might as well give Vista RC2 a spin. After RC1 turned the laptop into a clam shell on the last try I had pretty much given up on doing that again. My experience with Linux this week gave me enough reason to try this again. After all, what is the worst that could happen? I would have to put the dreaded Toshiba recovery cd back in and reboot and restore the laptop to factory defaults. How many times have I done this in the last 2 months? I have lost count. LOL
The first install of Vista locked up the laptop. I am not sure what happened so I turned the laptop off for several minutes, restarted it and gave it try number 2. Heck, you cant say you gave it a Boy Scout effort if you just give up when a computer freezes up right? In this case the second try was the charm. I left it running and went to church to attend the weekly praise team practice and left my son Justin watching the laptop as it installed the new OS.
As luck would have it the install went flawlessly and when I got home after practice I was greeted with the initial desktop setup screen which allowed me to set up specific user paramaters that would allow me to log on to the desktop. So far so good by this point. The install process rebooted the laptop several times and before you know it I was running with Vista RC2 without any major catastrophes. The first test for me was to insert the Linksys Wifi card into the same pcmcia slot and see what happened. What happened caused me to smile because Vista saw it immediately and started installing Broadcom wireless driver software for it. I dug around in the network setup section and figured out how to connect to my WAP here at home. I can not begin to tell you how happy I am that Microsoft has completely screwed up the networking configuration in Vista. Then again that is outside the scope of this article so I will visit that again as I learn more. I was very suprised that Vista identified the wireless adapter as a Broadcom and not Linksys which is the brand. The wireless Linux gurus at work told me that the Linksys card probably uses the Broadcom chipset and that is why that happened. I guess you learn something every day huh? I removed the broadcom drivers, reinstalled the Linksys Wifi manager and drivers and rebooted. Guess what? The wifi manager would not run and the drivers for the Linksys wifi card were not recognized by Vista. So, you know the drill, out with Linksys drivers and software, rebooted and let Vista work magic with its Broadcom drivers all over again. Heck , if it is not broke why fix it??
I am happy to report that over all I am pretty happy with Vista RC2. I have serveral hurdles to overcome and the immediate one will be to figure out how to do this and that in this OS vs XP SP2. In an effort to remove any and all security risks in the OS Microsoft has screwed the lid down on the pot so tightly that you have to pull out a screw gun and take all the screws loose so you can see what is happening under the hood. That probably did not make sense as far as word pictures go but hopefull you got that. LOL
My first software snafu came when I tried to install and USE Incredimail. For some of you that wont be a huge loss especially if you dont use it for email. However I am not so fortunate because a good friend of mine got me stuck on Incredimail long ago and now I feel creatively crippled when I can not use all of the cool stationary and animated gizmos that comes with this email client. The application installs just fine however when the app starts up and the notifier starts up to tell you that you have new mail the application locks tight as a drum. Vista now has a cool software widget that TELLS YOU the obvious. " Incredimail is experiencing a problem and will now be shut down. Before we kill the processes involved we will see if we can peek under the hood and fix it for you." So far all the widget really does is confirm the blantantly obvious fact that the app is frozen. The other thing it does is give you a handy dandy little link to the website of the software manufacturer. I bet Google is pretty hacked off about that functionality. LOL.... Hey honey, how can I figure out where to find the Incredimail website dear? How about www.incredi...... OH STOP IT.... LOL
Our next stop in the software discovery zone last night was in Microsoft Vista Widget land. Vista has a desktop application launcher like Rocketdock. However , from what I can tell you can only use Microsoft Widgets that they developed and I dont think you can drag normal apps in there to use. Please understand that I am still a rattle shaking toddler when it comes to this OS so I might be wrong about that. As of now I have the following widgets showing on my desktop along with my desktop icons which I will remove later if I can. At the top I have the Weatherbug widget , in the middle I have the analog clock widget and under that is the CPU/MEM system widget and at the bottom I put a calculator widget since I am always and forever figuring out how much moola I need to give away to the creditors. LOL...
My third stop in software discovery zone today happened to be with Symantec Anti Virus which is provided for free by the college where I work. I plugged my laptop into the work LAN and downloaded the latest and greatest version of Norton Anti Virus by Symantec. I spent at least 2 hours trying to get Norton Live Update to work only to find out that version 10.1 does not work with Vista but version 10.2 does. On my first install of the new version that is supposed to work with Vista Live Update did not install correctly and all of my pretty icons turned into white place holders. I was pretty excited about that developement, let me tell ya. I decided to reboot the PC thinking that maybe I needed to after a major install of an AV product even though I thought it was weird that it did not prompt me to do it anyway. When I rebooted the pc I was greeted by the dreaded recovery screen as if I had pushed F8 on boot up. I was once again reminded my Microsoft that there was a problem in software land and the OS was having a problem booting. Imagine that huh? I would have never known except for the pretty logo that was supposed to be there was GONE..... LOL
In a desperation attempt I clicked on the trusty and faithful LAST KNOWN GOOD menu selection and I was greeted by a pretty Vista logo and the logon screen. When I finally landed back on my user desktop GUI all of my icon place holders were once again pretty icons. Woooohooooo. Vista was happy but Norton Anti Virus was not. After several attempts I managed to get Live Update reinstalled and working. Live Update is doing what it is supposed to be doing however the definition file screen is not showing todays date yet. After researching the specific error on Google I was told to delete all the live update index files etc and that is supposed to fix that problem finally. I will play around with that tomorrow.
I have Microsoft Office 2003 installed with no problems and I installed AVS Video Tools on the laptop and I am converting some video files to .wmv format with no problems. I am noticing that AVS is a cpu hog as it has the cpu system clock pegged solid at 100%. I am pleased to say that out of 1 gb of ram on my laptop it is only using 33% of the available ram.

Linux and wireless nightmares

I am sad to say that while Fedora Core (RedHat) Linux installed just fine on the Toshiba Satelite laptop I still had issues with it. The first issue that I had was that I was having problems downloading all of the updates from the RedHat repositories. Perhaps they were just busy and that is why I kept having to start all over again with multiple downloads. The major issue that I was facing with regards to using Linux as the primary OS for my laptop was the wireless network card configuration nightmare that faced me. Lets just say that everything that I read about how to make this happen is not for the faint hearted. As a matter of fact I would go as far to say that your typical Windows literate computer users would not be able to figure this out on their own. Here are a couple of reasons why. First and foremost Linux does come with its own version of a GUI desktop such as KDE in Ichthux however it is so different that you can easily get lost. The GUI interface easily avails the user to the familiar Internet related applications such as Firefox, Email, IRC, IM programs etc. The fly in the ointment is that when you get ready to do any basic maintenance or try to install any software you are in for a treat. That treat is called the terminal window or command prompt. That is where the real nightmare begins and your excitement of using a new OS ends. The second reason that most folks would run screaming from Linux is that the install procedure for applications is no where near as intuitive as your typical windows software. There is a program built into Linux called Adept which allows you to download new updates for the OS Kernel and other applications that come with that particular distribution of Linux. Those packages seem to install ok however the gotcha with that is if you install a program that will conflict with another one of the apps already installed it could potentially corrupt the whole install of Linux and render it useless. Do you remember what Spy Assassin did to the first install of Ichthux the other day? Now lets say you are out surfing the web and you want to download a program off the web that is Linux compatible. Lets take Firefox for example. You download it just fine but then you get to take a trip down nightmare lane in the terminal program where you have to figure out how to extract the compressed fine, change directories to the location of those files and then try to install it. Good luck on that one. The third reason that folks would give up on Linux on the laptop especially is the difficulty level of installing your wireless adapter. Fedora Core did not recognize the Linksys Wireless adapter that was plugged in to the pcmcia card slot. The BIOS recognized its presence through card and socket services and provided the needed power to the device but Linux certainly did not see it. I wont bore you with all of the gory details of what it entails but lets just say that what I read about HOW I needed to get it to work was enough to make me say " Is all of this really worth running Linux on my laptop??" Sadly enough the potential migrane caused me to change directions on what OS I would use on the laptop. One other thing that you seriously need to consider about playing around with Linux is that you really do not want to try to dual boot this OS with a Windows Operating System. The reason I say this is because you can delete the partition that Linux is on but you will have a lot of fun getting rid of the GRUB Boot Loader that Linux installs in the Master Boot Record. Thanks to my inexperience with Linux boot loaders and my not changing the Adminstrator password on XP I found myself just using the recovery cd to wipe the drive and start from scratch. POOF. All my software configurations were gone AGAIN. LOL...

Out with Ichthux and IN with Fedora on laptop

Ok, for now I am done with the Ichthux distro on the Toshiba laptop. I learned , much to may chagrin, that I was not able to remove the Linux partitions (GRUB boot loader) without trashing my ability to boot to Windoze. I had four partitions, one of them NTFS where Windoze resided of course. The active partition was on partition 1 where the GRUB boot loader resides. Windoze does NOT like it when it does not have control over the MBR (Master Boot Record). So, when I used 98 Fdisk version to remove the partitions and changed the Active partition to the one that had NTFS it would no longer boot up. I tried to boot to an XP install cd and select R for repair but it wanted the Administrator password. The last time I recovered my laptop with the recovery cd I forgot to set a password for Administrator. That means NO repair of the MBR, atleast not with keeping the existing install of XP. So, since I am going to have to do the recovery cd AGAIN one of my buddies at work told me to try Fedora Core on my laptop and see how well that works. Since I am in rebuild mode anyway, I say why not!!!!! It will be interesting to see if I can get the wireless functionality to work with Linux. That will be the ultimate in success if I can make that work. I sure am glad that I have all my data on cd and USB jump drives so I can restore it if need be.

Ichthux saga continues

After bowling last night I settled down into my cozy recliner, my laptop and the airdesk that it sits on. I logged on to console and managed to use the sudo adduser command and added the user jcmoffitt thinking that maybe the james account was just hosed up. Of course I can not do anything that requires su or root privileges so I guess the jcmoffitt account was just a plain user account. I figured at that point if I could get past the gui and at least logon then that would be ok until I can reset the root password. I was foiled again and I still can not logon. I got the Ichthux cd that is version 6.09 and tried to install that on the same partition. The install process got almost to the end then the installer crashed. GRRRRRRRRR I am starting to think that running Linux on my Toshiba laptop is not going to happen. I am starting to wonder if the hassle of it all is even worth it. LOL... I am not giving up yet.... My programmer friend at work is wondering if this might be a font issue vs a logon issue. I dunno to be honest with you... Perhaps I should try to load a different version of Linux on the laptop. Any suggestions from someone that has a Toshiba Laptop and a successful install? I have installed 6.09 Ichthux on two of my desktop computers on my network at home with absolutely no problems. Laptops may be a tad bit more finicky with regards to drivers etc.

Ichthux Version 6.10 update

I got home from bowling last night and was eager to mess up my laptop one more time. LOL... Ok, I was NOT eager to mess up my laptop however I knew that my adventuresome spirit might get me into trouble again. When it comes to technology I guess that I dont worry about things getting messed up because when that happens you have to LEARN in order to fix the mess. I plugged the laptop in and thanks to something I found on a user group yesterday afternoon I knew to plug in the laptop to the hardwired network. Once that was done I started the install process and it worked like a charm. For whatever reasons Ichthux likes for you to be connected to the Internet so that it can go out to the data repositories and get the latest and greatest code. The install process took all of 15 minutes. I rebooted my laptop and was greeted with the new boot manager screen which gave me a choice between Linux and XP Pro. I chose Linux, it booted up to a nice pretty blue screen. Version 6.10 looks a little bit different than 6.09 but not anything major. I put in my user id and password that I had set up during the install procedure and guess what? I could not log on to save my life. Go figure sports fans. Now I have a new OS on my laptop that I want to tinker with and I can not log on. LOL... Luckily for me the laptop works fine with XP Pro so I am not crippled too badly. I have joined several Linux support groups and left a message to see if someone can help.

Linux registered user 441766

I have been playing around with Ichthux which is a Linux distribution for Christians. I am on a steep learning curve since it has been ages since I missed around with RedHat years and years ago. I guess I am dating myself a bit huh? So, anyway, without further ado I am officially a registered Linux user. I am not sure what that really gives me other than association with the Linux user group but I think that is cool in and of itself. I have a cool graphic that I can add to my web pages as well which I will start to use. Neat stuff if you ask me. I am running the 6.09 distribution kernel and have it installed on two computers at home. My main Gateway machine is dual booting XP SP2 and Linux and my kids computer has ONLY Ichthux installed. I am not winning any popularity contests having done this so I guess I need to figure a way to get a spare computer other than theirs to play with Linux on. I can not get Linux to run on my Toshiba laptop and I wont be trying that install process any time in the near future. It really is a pain in the keister to have to install everything from scratch when you blow up a hard drive partition with Windoze loaded on it.

My next learning task will be to learn how to connect to Windows Network shares and a network printer. Wish me luck!!

Linux for Christians

http://www.ichthux.com/

I spoke with a friend of mine in Switzerland yesterday afternoon around 1 pm and he told me that he uses Linux. We were trying to figure out why he was not able to access our ministry chat room from his computer. We discovered that he needed to upgrade his version of Macromedia Flash he was running under Linux. Well, he was actually running it ON top of Linux but you know what I mean. Once we figured this out he was able to get in to the chat channel without any problems. We got to talking about Linux and he told me that he despises Mickeysoft and that he can do everything on the Internet that I can under Windows XP. I have dabbled with Linux RedHat on occasion over the last 10 years and I know what kind of a pain that this OS can be for the computer professional much less a novice. I think that the last time I installed Red Hat it took me several hours and I had to pull the computer apart and write down chipset information for all the major hardware pieces.
Since then Linux has come a long way and now a novice can pop in a cdrom and answer some questions and the install process takes off much like a Windows install. I played around with something called Knoppix several months ago but got bored with it because I could not save any data to the hard drive. With Ichthux you can either run it as an active cd user and save data to your USB Jump drive or you can actually install it to your local hard drive.

During the install process Ichthux loads up a partition appliction that gives you several choices as to how you want to install the OS. You can tell it to wipe the hard drive and format it and do a clean install or you can point it over to a second hard drive and leave your boot drive alone. Ichthux partition manager also allows you to do a dual boot configuration on hda0 and you can dual boot XP and Linux at the same time. That is the configuration that I went with on my Gateway PC today. I actually dual boot both XP and Linux. XP stays on C drive on had0 and I put Linux on D drive of my ide slave hard disk.

I attempted to dual boot Linux and XP on my Toshiba laptop and wound up hosing the original OS to the point of no return. Once again I had wished that I had made a ghost image of my hard drive BEFORE I allowed my adventuresome spirit to get the best of me. Ichthux would NOT successfully install on my laptop no matter what configuration I tried. I figure there must be a chip set of some sort that would not work right. I spent most of last night and today rebuilding my laptop with XP SP2 and all of its associated apps and while I did that I installed Ichthux on my Gateway system.

I need to get back on the Linux bandwagon and learn it so that I can use something other than Windoze and so I can list this OS on my skills sheet or resume as something I am proficient in. I am sure it will take a little bit of time for me to learn it but I am more than willing.