Windows 7: Easy Transfer & the Upgrade from Windows XP

I had a big Windows XP Professional SP3 installation that had become dysfunctional to the point of crashing daily.  It was time for an upgrade.  In doing the upgrade, I hoped to preserve my settings from that installation, so as to reduce the amount of time I would have to spend installing and adjusting programs in Windows 7.  There seemed to be two ways to achieve that.  This post starts with one, and then transitions to the other.

When the Win7 CD booted, it gave me the option to "Install now."  Before doing that, I clicked on "What to know before installing Windows."  It told me that I might have the option of doing an upgrade installation that would keep my existing files, settings, and programs.  With previous versions of Windows, users were strongly encouraged to do a "clean install" rather than an "in-place install" to avoid creating new problems.  People seemed to be recommending that same approach for Win7 as well.  I figured that I would try the upgrade nonetheless, if only to see how it worked.  Microsoft estimated that, depending on how many application programs and how much data was involved, an installation of Windows 7 could take anywhere between 30 minutes and 20 hours.

When I clicked "Install now" and then Upgrade, it told me to remove the installation disc, restart so that Windows XP would start normally, and then reinsert the installation disc and restart again.  Apparently it had added some kind of data collection file to the hard drive, and now it needed to see what I had installed.  I booted into XP and then rebooted, but forgot to reinsert the disc after shutting down XP, so I had to do this again.  The first time around, I noticed that the taskbar had changed from my preferred classic format to the default XP format.  The second time, it wasn't like that -- it just showed my usual classic desktop -- and when the double-rebooting process was done and I was back to a boot from the installation disc, it wasn't going any further:  it just cycled me back to a reboot in WinXP.  I didn't know if I had and lost an upgrade option there.  Other sources didn't think so:  the general story seemed to be that this upgrade path was only available to Vista users, and maybe that was why I was just looping.

Failing that, I looked into the Easy Transfer option.  After booting into XP again, I loaded the Win7 installation DVD, copied its \support\migwiz folder to my hard drive, renamed it "Windows 7 Migration Wizard," and ran migwiz.exe inside that folder as a standalone, without the DVD.  This gave me the tool for future purposes, without having to hunt for the DVD, and it also ran a bit faster than when I had started to run it from the DVD drive.  MigWiz gave me the option of using an Easy Transfer cable, a network, or an external drive to transfer items to the new computer (which, in this case, would be the same computer, after installing Win7).  I wondered whether everything would fit onto a 4GB USB drive, so I tried that option.  It took five or ten minutes to calculate what it would be including in the transfer, and then produced an estimate of more than 100GB.  So apparently it was including my data in the transfer.  I clicked on its Customize option, and it rolled out a half-dozen items.  Almost all of that huge bulk was in its "Other Items" section.  I clicked Advanced and de-selected all that extra data.  Now it was down to a 3GB transfer.  It wanted to save that stuff on a USB or other external drive, but I wondered why I couldn't just save it to a different internal drive, somewhere other than drive C.  So I tried that.  Transfer of data from the Administrator account proceeded slowly.  The wizard estimated that the transfer would take about 17 hours.  I decided to take a nap.  But before I could get around to that, the transfer was done.  Time flies.  The wizard told me to open the .mig transfer file after finishing my Windows upgrade.

With that done, I rebooted the Windows 7 DVD and, this time, chose the Custom rather than the Upgrade installation option.  (Win7 had given me a different screen when installing on a machine where it did not detect a previous Windows installation on the hard drive.)  I designated the same location as my existing WinXP installation.  The installer told me that my previous files would be moved to a folder called Windows.old.  It also said that Windows might create additional partitions for system files.  Ultimately, I did not use this installation.  Instead, I developed the Win7 installation on a different computer, as described in a separate post.

A couple of weeks passed, as I dealt with other things, including the installation and reinstallation of Win7 as described in that other post.  I had decided I should go ahead with the basic installation of programs, though not with their configuration, since surely the 3GB .mig file did not contain all of my programs and settings.  Possibly I was wrong about that.  We would soon see.

At this point, I was looking at two files or folders.  One was the Windows Easy Transfer.mig file, which hopefully contained all of the stuff I would be restoring to my new Win7 installation.  The other was the Windows 7 Migration Wizard (above), now contained in its own folder.  How to proceed next?

I tried double-clicking on the Windows Easy Transfer.mig file.  That seemed to be the answer.  It opened up a dialog that offered to transfer two types of items.  One, "Administrator," was 85MB.  The other, "Shared Items," was 2.8GB.  I started with Administrator.  I clicked its Customize button.  It was going to give me Desktop, Favorites, Quick Launch, Program Settings, and Other Items.  I clicked its Advanced option.  Sad to say, at this point I didn't want what I saw there.  It seemed to have stuff related only to Microsoft programs, which I had reinstalled without much difficulty.  I was using Office 2003, which still had the Save My Settings Wizard, so it had been pretty easy to restore the settings for those programs.  But how about all the other bazillion utilities and assorted programs I used?  That's where the serious time investment would be.  From what I saw here, that stuff wasn't included in the Administrator option.  So, OK, I went to the other one, Shared Items > Customize > Advanced.  This seemed to contain the same items as the Administrator option.  Apparently the Admin option contained some information, but this Shared Items part contained the bulk of the program data.  But whatever.  I didn't need it.  End of story!

Windows 7: Upgrade Installation to Win7 Software RAID0 Array

I was trying to install an upgrade version of Windows 7 on a RAID0 array.  This post contains some notes on what I learned about the possibilities.

I had a new basic hard drive.  I started by installing Win7 on that drive.  The upgrade version of Windows 7 required a previous version of Windows to be installed.  It was not enough just to have the previous disc or serial number.  I was interested in upgrading from Windows XP.  To accomplish this installation, then, I had to install my copy of Windows XP and then upgrade from there.

Having done that, I used Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) in Win7 to create a couple of Windows 7 software RAID0 arrays on two other empty hard drives.  Unlike other RAID solutions, Win7 was willing to create multiple arrays and single-drive partitions on a pair of drives being used in a RAID0 array.

I hoped to install Win7 into one of those arrays (which I called PROG-FUTURE), and to put my data into another.  Of course, since this was RAID0, I planned to have a good backup scheme for the data.

I went ahead and copied my data into that RAID0 data array.  Later, when it came time to try to install the Win7 upgrade to the PROG-FUTURE array, it seemed that this might have been a mistake.  An attempt to install WinXP to PROG-FUTURE got as far as the point where the installer recognized the various partitions on my drives.  It saw the entire hard drive as a single dynamic disk.  In other words, WinXP might have been willing to install to at least one of the two drives I was using for my RAID arrays.  It gave no sign that it would install itself in any array format to two drives simultaneously.

I was not sure whether an attempt to install WinXP, Win7, or any other operating system to a dynamic drive would run into problems.  There did exist a Dynamic Disk Converter program, and probably others like it, that would apparently be able to convert the dynamic disk to a basic disk format.  I could not say how well such programs would work.

It had occurred to me that perhaps I could use the Universal Restore feature of Acronis True Image Home 2011 (ATIH) to restore a working Win7 installation to the PROG-FUTURE array.  My attempts along those lines did not succeed.  As far as I could tell, ATIH was not capable of restoring a RAID0 array.

Another possibility was to use Ubuntu 10.10 to copy Windows 7 program files from a Win7 installation on a basic drive to the PROG-FUTURE array.  This did not appear feasible at this time, however, because Ubuntu evidently could not see the Win7 RAID0 array as such.  I also wasn't sure whether the resulting partition would actually boot.

An attempt to install directly from the Win7 upgrade CD to the PROG-FUTURE array failed early in the process, when I received this error message:

Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space.  The partition contains one or more dynamic volumes that are not supported for installation.

It appeared, in other words, that Windows 7 could not be installed to a software RAID0 array created by Win7 itself.  I found a thread suggesting that there were ways to make it work, but it seemed that the process was tricky and prone to problems.  It appeared that the array would probably better be created from some other software or by using a RAID0 controller on the motherboard or on a separate controller card.  Another possibility that I had not heard of previously was native virtual hard disk (VHD) boot.

Linksys WRT54GL Router: Brick Testing & Debricking

I had a Linksys WRT54GL v. 1.1 router, running in Windows 7.  The router did not seem to be functioning properly.  I wanted to find out whether it was "bricked," as they called it -- whether some tinkering on my part, or some power surge, or something else had turned it into a useless brick, a paperweight.  I wanted to get it back into service, if I could, and I also wanted to look into the possibility of upgrading its firmware while I was at it.  This post describes the steps I took along those lines.

First, I followed a set of steps to see if the router was bricked.  I disconnected all ethernet cables and plugged in its power cable, and let it sit that way, powered up but not being used, for at least five minutes.  Next, I connected the router only to the computer that I would be using to examine its condition.  I did not connect it to the modem or to any other computers.  Then I started gathering basic information.

Gathering Basic Information

I went into Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Local Area Connection.  In the Local Area Connection Status dialog, I clicked on Details.  (I could have done approximately the same thing in a command ("cmd") box.  To open a command box, I would have gone to the Start button and typed "cmd" into the "Search programs and files" box.  In the command box, I would have typed "ipconfig /all.")

In that Network Connection Details dialog, I saw that I had the IPv4 address assigned by the router.  By default, it was 192.168.1.100.  I also saw that the IPv4 Default Gateway was 192.168.1.1.  As far as my network was concerned, this (192.168.1.1) was the address for my router.  I had not set it that way; this was the default address for this model of router.

I closed the Network Connection Details dialog and clicked on the Properties button, there in the Local Area Connection Status dialog.  In Local Area Connection Properties, I scrolled down and selected Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4).  I clicked on Properties.  There, I saw that the computer was set to "Obtain an IP address automatically."  So I knew that I had not manually instructed the computer to use 192.168.1.100.  That address (192.168.1.100) was appearing in the Network Connection Details dialog (above) because the router was putting it there.

In short, the computer was connected to the router at the router's default address of 192.168.1.1.  The computer was then obtaining its own assigned IP address of 192.168.1.100 from the router.  The computer was set to accept automatically whatever IP address the router assigned.

I could verify that the router was indeed set to assign an IP address of 192.168.1.100.  Indeed, I could change that address, if I had some reason to do so.  I could do this by logging into an internal webpage hosted within the router itself.  The router was my computer's gateway onto the Internet.  As described above, the router's default gateway address was 192.168.1.1.  I could go to that address using an Internet browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox).  I just had to type those numbers, with nothing else, into the address bar of an Internet browser, and hit Enter.  That would take me to the router's login box.  By default, the username for this model was just left blank, and the password was "admin."  If the username or password were forgotten, a reset would be the likely solution.

In the router's internal webpage, in the Setup > Basic Setup tab, I verified that 192.168.1.100 was the assigned "Starting IP Address."  (Other computers on the network would automatically be given related but not identical numbers.)  I could also have changed the router's Local IP Address at that point, if I had had some reason to do so.

Testing the Router

Now that I had this information, I could proceed.  If I had gotten information different from that provided above, it might have been because the router was not working right, or because I (or someone else) had changed the default settings.

Now I could just verify that the router was definitely in touch with the computer.  I had already done that by logging into the router's internal webpage.  Instead, I could have just typed this into a command box:  "ping 192.168.1.1" (or whatever the router's gateway address was).  If it came back with a set of statements indicating that it had received a reply, then that meant that the ping had gotten a response from the router, so all was good.  This situation could be compared against the alternative by unplugging the ethernet cable leading to the router.  In that case, the "ping 192.168.1.1" command would produce no reply or some kind of error message (e.g., "Destination host unreachable").

Nonresponse from the router could just mean that there was something incorrect about the addresses being used.  It could also mean that the router was bricked.  Another clue would come from the power light on the router.  If it was dimmer than the other front-panel lights, or if it just kept on blinking, that would be another clue that it was bricked.

I did not have these problems.  But I was having problems that seemed to be related, at least partly, to the router.  So I looked for more information on testing it.  I found the so-called "peacock thread" on the DD-WRT website.  Its Note 6 defined a bricked router as follows:

A bricked router is a router that you can no longer communicate with through wireless or wired connections. It will give no response. Just because a router doesn't seem to be fully working, doesn't mean it is bricked. . . . A brick will not respond to pings at all.

By this definition, my router was not bricked.  I could communicate with it.  It was just not fully working.  Note 6 went on to provide further information.  It referred to the TTL values produced when I typed "ping 192.168.1.1" (above).  Mine was TTL=64.  Note 6 said this meant that the operating system firmware on the router was responding.  It sounded like some routers would deliberately start at TTL=100, which was apparently a slower setting more suitable for starting the process of upgrading the firmware, and would then switch to TTL=64.  To ping continuously and see if things changed, the command provided above would get an additional -t.  That is, the command would be "ping -t 192.168.1.1."  Usually, if the firmware was not functioning, there would be no response.  Other possible responses were TTL=1 (apparently the same as TTL=100 for these purposes) and "Destination host unreachable," which Note 6 said could be fixed by making sure the computer and the router were using the same static IP subnet.  There were other possibilities.  Note 6 summarized the situation thus:

Some routers can be bricked even if they do give some ttl=100 responses to pings, but this is less common. Some routers can be bricked if the lights are not all lit, but again, this is not common. However, if the lights are all lit, and you cannot get a ping response, the router is definitely bricked.

Again, it seemed clear, mine was not bricked.  I was not clear what that meant.  It wasn't working, but it also wasn't nonworking.  It was working in the sense that I could get into its operating system, but not in the sense that it would actually function as a router.  It seemed there were hardware and software versions of being bricked.  I decided to upgrade the firmware and see what would happen.

The Hard (30+30+30+10+10) Reset

Since it didn't look like my router was bricked, the next step was to do a hard reset.  They recommended doing this before and after every firmware upgrade.  This began with an effort to verify where the reset button was.  On the Linksys WRT54GL, there was a recessed reset button on the back panel, and there was also a concealed button behind the glowing Cisco Systems logo on the left side of the front panel.  The manual was not clear on this.  The button on the back panel seemed to be definitely a reset button.  The one on the front might have been intended only to clear the SSID and WPA Personal keys.

Following instructions, with the router connected to nothing except its power cord, I pushed the rear-panel Reset button and held it down.  After 30 seconds, still pressing the button, I unplugged the power cord.  After another 30 seconds, still pressing the button, I replugged the power cord.  After another 30 seconds -- a total of 90 seconds -- I stopped pressing the Reset button.  Then began what they should have called the 10+10 part of the procedure:  wait 10 seconds after releasing the Reset button, then disconnect the power cord again and wait another 10 seconds, then replug the power cord.  I did all this.  My power LED was not continuously flashing.  I was ready for the next step.

Debricking the Router

I was visualizing some kind of cold shower or slap across the face -- something, anyway, that would deprogram the router back to normalcy, after which a person would then go ahead and fulfill the societal role of reprogramming with "correct" content.  But at this point, it did not appear that there was any unbricking procedure per se.  You just had to reset the router and then install firmware on it.  I wasn't even sure what difference it would make if it was a brick:  it seemed like a person would go through the same steps regardless, as long as s/he wished to upgrade the firmware.  On this understanding, I passed Go, collected $200, and commenced onward to the upgrade step.

Preparing to Upgrade

DD-WRT offered firmware upgrades specifically designed for Linksys routers.  The DD-WRT firmware options had features that did not seem to be included with the standard Linksys firmware.  Most of these features seemed to be designed for networking freaks, but that obseration probably somewhat reflected my ignorance of what many of them even meant.  A few did pop out at me, though.  I thought it would be at least potentially useful, and might sometimes be important, to have features like bandwidth monitoring, a Connection Warning Notifier, a presumably improved kind of firewall, and perhaps a Samba client, since I had had problems getting Samba up and running previously.  Wikipedia offered a pared-down list of what may have been the most important features.

Guided by the Wikipedia list, and by the advice that I should first upgrade with only the micro or mini versions of DD-WRT, I chose the mini.  It had a few more features.  I double-checked my router version on the DD-WRT hardware database.  It said that versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the WRT54GL were supported.  I went to the hardware-specific page for this router.  I liked the idea of upgrading then again, from the mini to the VoIP, because I used Skype; but when I browsed the list of features, it didn't seem like the VoIP option had a lot of additional stuff to offer over the mini.  (The features mentioned above seemed to be included in the mini.)  So I decided a follow-up upgrade would come later, if at all.

It was a bit tricky to find the download.  It turned out that what I had to do was to use the hardware database, enter WRT54GL, and then double-click on the results list (consisting of just that one item).  It gave me three different versions of the Mini:  generic, or for flashing by TFTP or web.  The hardware-specific page said I should use the generic version if I was installing via web.  The web-based approach looked like it might be easier (i.e., harder to screw up).  I decided to use the web-based approach, so I downloaded the generic version (using computer B, which was not connected to the router, though I could also have connected computer A directly to the modem, bypassing the router, and downloaded it over there, which would have saved me the step of copying it over by USB flash drive).  The hardware-specific page pointed me to a specific build fo DD-WRT, so I also downloaded that.  I wasn't sure if I would use it, though, because I couldn't tell for sure if it was for the web or TFTP approach.  It was also smaller than the generic one I got from the hardware database, making me think maybe the webpage promoting it hadn't been updated for a while.  I used a USB jump drive and copied the upgrade files over to computer A.

For the web-based approach, they warned me to use Internet Explorer, not Firefox, though I noticed that someone said Firefox was fine too.  They also advised making sure I had file sharing and could browse to see other computers on the network.  This was not the case for me.  I was hoping that the router could help me solve problems with my network, as described in other posts.  They further advised making sure the computer's power options would not trigger the screen saver, or worse, during this process.  Having reset the router (above), they advised to reboot the computer and log in to the router (above).  I saw somewhere the advice to disable the Windows firewall, so I did that too (Control Panel > Windows Firewall > Turn Windows Firewall on or off).

There were some further recommended steps.  One was to make sure I had everything I needed before I started, because of course I wouldn't be able to go online with the target computer -- which was one of the reasons why I found it advisable to have at least two computers.  This bit of advice was especially important if, for some reason, a failed upgrade would mean the end of Internet contact from that workspace.  I also had to disable security settings and programs.  This included disabling antivirus (Start > search for Security Essentials > turn off real-time protection > Save changes); disabling Windows Defender real-time protection (approximately the same steps); turning off User Account Control (UAC) (Control Panel > User Accounts > Change UAC settings > Never notify > OK); and turning Local Intranet security all the way down (Control Panel > Internet Options > Security tab). 

As advised, I planned to use a wired (not wireless) connection to the router.  I enabled TFTP as a precaution (Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off > TFTP client).  It seemed that I did not have to worry about Compound TCP, which was evidently disabled by default in Windows 7.  I did not have to disable wireless (Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center), since I had not set it up in the first place.

Upgrading the Firmware

Now the game began.  The router was connected only to computer A.  I logged in to it on computer A at 192.168.1.1 (above) and went to Administration > Firmware Upgrade and browsed to the DD-WRT*.bin upgrade file that I had decided to install.  I clicked Upgrade and left the room for a minute or two.  When I came back, it said, "Upgrade is successful."  I clicked Continue.  I then noticed I was supposed to wait five minutes before clicking Continue.  So now I waited.  When the router's WLAN light was on (and I had the impression it came on pretty quickly), the upgrade was said to be complete.  Nonetheless, I waited.  When the minutes were up, I had to enter a username and password.  According to the DD-WRT FAQs, the default username was "root" and the password was "admin."  It seemed that I was safe in clicking the Continue button, because when I did enter the password, I got a warning:

W A R N I N G

Upgrading firmware may take a few minutes.
Do not turn off the power or press the reset button!

This part did take a while, especially because I thought I was supposed to wait there.  Eventually it dawned on me that I should go ahead and click the Upgrade button that was staring at me.  Did we not already do this?  Apparently the concept was that I had last been in the Administration > Firmware Upgrade section, and now, after the upgrade, I had been returned to that same section.  So, sure, I could go ahead and upgrade the firmware again if I wanted, but otherwise we were done.  I was supposed to do another hard (30-30-30-10-10) reset, so I disconnected the ethernet cable from the router and did that. 

There were a few things that I did not need to know, but might have needed under other circumstances.  I did not need to know how to recover from a bad flash.  I did not need to know how to put the router into management mode, so as to ease a command-line installation.  There were tons of other instructions and information, but now that I had gone through it once, I thought that it probably could have been quite a bit quicker and more streamlined than it had been for me.

The Acid Test

On computer A, before going online, I now had to re-enable my security software.  I connected the computer to the router and logged back into the router's internal webpage.  The control panel still had the same basic arrangement as before, though sleeker.  For the moment, I left it at the default settings.  I connected the router to the modem.  I still wasn't able to go online.  Following advice, I went back to the router's webpage and made some changes.  In Setup > Basic Setup, I changed Conection Type to PPPoE.  That gave me an opportunity to enter my AT&T username and password.  I clicked Apply at the bottom of that screen.  After a minute, it had finished applying those changes.  I tried again.  Still no luck.

In short, upgrading the router's firmware did not seem to help computer A go online.  It also did not seem to make any significant difference in helping computer A communicate with computer B.  Both the router and a network switch were able to show the existence of the other computer, but not much beyond that.  Tentatively, it appeared that the uncertain status of my router, going into this project, tended to predict an uncertain outcome.  It was not really bricked, and therefore could not be saved; rather, it was just not working right, for some unknown reason, and all this effort could not change that.

Transitioning Away from Windows Toward Ubuntu: The Next Step

In September 2008, I reached a point of relative stasis in the development of my computer setup.  I was using two computers, each with its own monitor, but with a common mouse and keyboard via KVM switch.  Both computers were dual-boot setups, so that I could have gone into Windows or Ubuntu on either one; but I tended to just use one or the other.  Specifically, on one computer, I installed Ubuntu and then used VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in virtual machines (VMs).  On the other computer, I was almost always running Windows XP, rarely going into Ubuntu.

I had assumed, there at the end of summer 2008, that I would be revisiting this layout in summer 2009.  Generally, that didn't happen.  Instead, two years passed.  At this point in 2010, however, I found that there had been some developments, such that this system could evolve.

One development was that, sometime in the intervening two years, I set up a third desktop computer.  It was mostly a collection of hand-me-down parts, but it ran Windows XP well enough.  If I really needed to do something in XP, I probably could do it there.  Moreover, I had acquired a laptop, for a bargain price of around $350 -- plus another $250 or so that I didn't entirely expect to spend, when I went to the store, for an extended warranty, laptop sleeve, screen protector, wireless mouse, etc.  Such a deal!  Anyway, neither the laptop nor the bucket-shop computer were anything to write home about, but they would serve in a pinch.

Another development was that I had run into several systems problems on the primary Windows XP machine.  It still ran stably, but I was getting occasional flaky problems.  Probably there would have been a list of them, if I had taken a minute to list the ways in which the machine was not performing up to snuff.

Probably the most worrisome such problem was that I had reached a dead-end in my efforts to install Windows updates on that primary machine.  It just wouldn't install them.  I had revisited the problem repeatedly.  At this point, it would probably have been more effective to just reinstall WinXP from scratch on that machine.

That update situation had been persisting for a while.  It hadn't bothered me much.  Recently, though, something else had happened.  I had somehow started using McAfee antivirus software, and I had just discovered that McAfee had been piling up gigabytes of stuff in .bup files.  I was concerned that this feat would have been possible only by mixing in data files; therefore, I had begun an effort to compare against an old backup and figure out what, if anything, might have gone missing over the past several months or longer.  So that was the end of McAfee, for me, but it was also a wake-up call to take computer security more seriously.  That meant keeping updates installed, but perhaps it also meant it was time to continue my migration away from Windows.

For such reasons, I thought it might be time to consider running both of my primary computers under the same kind of Ubuntu - VMware - WinXP VM setup.  If I needed XP, I could still drop back into the dual-boot, or just use that hand-me-down computer.  If I needed Vista or Windows 7, I could use the laptop, which was presently running the one but which apparently qualified for a free upgrade to the other.

In addition to those developments on the Windows side, things had also been happening on the Ubuntu side of the equation.  First, the good things.  Ubuntu was looking good and running well.  I had learned a bit more about Wine.  Generally, I was continuing to become more familiar and comfortable with the world beyond Windows.  I still had occasional issues with VMware, but generally nothing lethal.  As an additional consideration, Oracle had created the impression that it might be positioning VirtualBox to compete effectively with VMware.  Even without that, it was still nice that I could leave a WinXP VM running in Ubuntu for a week without needing to reboot it, while that would just never work on the native WinXP machine.

At the same time, after these several years of experimenting with Ubuntu, I had to agree with someone who had said that Linux distributions still tended to be terribly unpolished in comparison with Windows.  Somewhat contrary to my expectations, I was not finding many instances in which Ubuntu programs were delivering superior functionality and reliability.  For instance, I had bought a copy of Beyond Compare, a file synchronization program.  (I subsequently realized that I probably could have gotten by with a freeware alternative, but whatever.)  There were Windows and Linux versions of Beyond Compare.  The Linux version did not seem to be very actively developed, and it was having problems that I wasn't having in the Windows version.  The same was true elsewhere.  I was still using IrfanView, which did not yet have a Linux version; I was still using CoolEdit 2000, because it had features that Audacity did not provide.  Generally, I was finding that Ubuntu was great as an operating system; I was finding it useful as an underlying layer, to handle tasks that WinXP couldn't handle (e.g., delete files that WinXP couldn't delete); I found that WinXP running in a VM on Ubuntu was more stable (although slower) than a native WinXP installation.  But at the point of application, for my purposes, Ubuntu wasn't a serious competitor against Windows XP.  And I was increasingly unwilling to invest the time to learn how to do everything in two or more different ways.

My conclusion, at this point, was that the best of both worlds called for running Windows XP within virtual machines (in VMware or otherwise) on an Ubuntu operating system base, on an Ubuntu/XP dual-boot computer.  I had already worked through many of the issues in this sort of setup, and could therefore hope to be efficient and preserve multiple troubleshooting options without too much of a time investment.  If Windows 7, Ubuntu, or some other operating system (OS) began to display capabilities that I badly needed, I would hopefully be able to incorporate those OSs into my setup, one computer at a time, without too much disruption overall.

Interrupted Upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

Using Update Manager, I was downloading an upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on my laptop.  I had to interrupt it.  When I started the laptop again and tried to resume the upgrade, I had problems.  For one thing, I wasn’t located in a place with wireless, and my wired ethernet connection was not working.  I had already downloaded the remaining upgrade packages at a wireless location, though, so I hoped it would be just a matter of starting the computer and installing those updates.  This, unfortunately, was not the case.  It seemed I had completely screwed up the Ubuntu kernel, and therefore had to choose an older kernel to install from in GRUB.  Then, when I went into System > Administration > Update Manager, I began to learn that my problems had only begun.

What I got, in Update Manager, was this message:

Not all updates can be installed.

Run a partial upgrade, to install as many updates as possible.

I clicked on the Partial Upgrade button.  This led to another message:

Broken packages

Your system contains broken packages that couldn’t be fixed with this software.  Please fix them first using synaptic or apt-get before proceeding.

I went into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.  It said this:

You have 7 broken packages on your system!

Use the “Broken” filter to locate them.

In Synaptic, I went to Edit > Fix Broken Packages.  This said:

An error occurred.

The following details are provided:

E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages

E: Unable to correct dependencies

I clicked Reload.  Synaptic was not able to download package information.  I canceled that.  I got a new message:

Could not download all repository indexes.

The repository may no longer be available or could not be contacted because of network problems.

I closed that.  Synaptic’s status bar said, “30190 packages listed, 1277 installed, 0 broken, 135 to install/upgrade, 7 to remove; 51.6 MB will be used.”  That sounded good.  I clicked Apply.  It asked me, “Apply the following changes?”  It had a warning:  “You are about to install software that can’t be authenticated!”  If it had been one or two items, I might have thought twice, but it was dozens of packages, some of which (e.g., seed) even had community documentation.  So I disregarded that warning.  Again, Synaptic tried to download package files and couldn’t, and it wouldn’t go any further until that was done.  So at this point I hibernated the Ubuntu installation and used the laptop solely in Vista mode until I could work through the ethernet problem or go to a wireless location again to continue.

When I did get back to this situation, I tried a number of solutions but ultimately was not able to recover from the interrupted upgrade process.  I therefore started over:  I used an Acronis True Image backup to restore Ubuntu 9.10 and then tried the upgrade again from there.

VMware Workstation 7 Installation: Permission Denied

I had been using VMware Workstation on Ubuntu for several years.  VMware put out a new release of Workstation 7, so I downloaded it.  I tried using the familiar steps I had used to upgrade VMware.  It had been just a matter of entering these two commands:

sudo chmod +x VMware-Workstation-Full-7.1.0-261024.i386.bundle 

sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-7.1.0-261024.i386.bundle

This time, though, it didn't work.  The first one went OK; but after the second one, I got this:

bash: ./VMware-Workstation-Full-7.1.0-261024.i386.bundle: Permission denied

Malcolm Lewis explained that I could use ./ to execute the file after running chmod, but I could skip the chmod command and just use one command:  sh [filename].  So I tried that.  And, you know, that worked.  Or at least it went further than before.  So apparently my chmod +x command was not sufficient to make the thing executable.  Possibly I needed to use chmod 777 or something.

I say it went further because I didn't type "sudo sh"; I just typed "sh" followed by the downloaded VMware bundle file.  So after it said, "Extracting VMware Installer...done," it stopped with an error:  "root access is required for the operations you have chosen."  I did it again with sudo, and this time it ran.  End of problem!

Tweaking Ubuntu 10.04

I had upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  Now I wanted to make some adjustments.  For this purpose, I would be drawing upon the first and second lists of adjustments I had made when I had installed 9.10.

The first of those other things was to install a PAE-enabled 10.04 kernel, so that I would have access to all of my system's RAM.  I also found that VMware Workstation 7.0 was requiring me to enter my serial number.  I had not entered it after installing it on 9.10; I had just been using the trial serial number.  Now, unfortunately, Workstation was not cooperating:  it was saying "Unknown error entering serial number."  The solution to this problem was to run Workstation as root (i.e., type "sudo vmware" at the Terminal prompt) and enter the serial number there.

Since I was doing an upgrade of a previous installation, I did not have to reinstall packages, but I did have a problem with Software Sources.  I have described that one in a separate post.  (Even if I had needed to reinstall packages, the "installed-software" trick described in the lists of adjustments (above) would have made short work of it.)  On my laptop, I was doing the same upgrade, and there I made some problems for myself when I had to interrupt the upgrade.  Here on the desktop, the next task was (as described in separate posts) to try to get the printing and scanning features of my Brother MFC-7340 printer working from within Ubuntu.  After doing that, I tackled a problem that I had wanted to solve for years:  how to import the list of AutoCorrect entries that I had created in Microsoft Word into OpenOffice.org Writer, running on Ubuntu.  That took some time, but then I was able to get back to the project of working through those notes from previous installations.

The upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 had preserved much of the configuration I had already set up.  So as I worked through the Ubuntu tweaking steps described in one of my previous posts, I had to deal with only a fraction of the issues addressed there.  One was to prevent icons for mounted drives from appearing on the desktop.  That called for Terminal:  “gconf-editor” > /apps/nautilus/desktop > unclick volumes_visible.  But it was already unclicked, and yet I did have icons for mounted drives visible on the desktop.  I went into Applications > System Tools > Ubuntu Tweak > Desktop Icon Settings and clicked Show desktop icons and left everything else unchecked, but this made no difference.  I tried again, this time using “sudo gconf-editor.”  Ah, yes.  The volumes_visible box was checked for root.  Unchecking it removed the icons from the desktop.

I had not noticed, but somewhere along the line, I had evidently installed nautilus-open-terminal via Synaptic, or possibly it came installed by default.  As its name suggested, this tool added a right-click (context menu) option in Nautilus, "Open in Terminal."  Unlike Windows Explorer, this option was only available for folders in the file listing in Nautilus -- in the right pane, that is, not in the left pane that would typically show the folder tree.  In that left pane, this and other options were absent.

Had another little problem.  During the upgrade to 10.04, the Firefox icon changed, on the left-side (formerly top) panel, to a red do-not-enter or not-allowed kind of icon; and in Applications > Internet, it changed to a grey question-mark box.  I fixed this by going to the panel, right-clicking on Applications > Edit Menus > Internet > Firefox > Properties, clicking on the icon, and selecting /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox.png.  Speaking of Firefox, I wanted Ubuntu to open Firefox and Google Chrome on startup.  I wanted to add these to a script that would run at startup, since I suspected that I would be coming up with other things that I wanted to have happen at startup too.  It seemed pretty technical – beyond my current ability, anyway – but it looked like I might be able to just write a script and put it into /etc./init.d.  I typed “sudo gedit” and then created a file called /etc./init.d/a_startup_script.sh.  I put, into it, the line that I got from e.g., right-clicking on Applications and choosing Edit Menus > Applications > Internet > Firefox > Properties:  “firefox %u.”  I saved it and typed “chmod +x /etc./init.d/a_startup_script.sh.”  Then I rebooted.  This achieved nothing.  So creating a general-purpose startup script remained a goal for the future.

I also went down Gizmo’s Freeware list of tweaks.  I had already done most of the ones I wanted, but there were a few others.  One was to install Windows TrueType fonts in Ubuntu.  I decided to extend their advice somewhat.  I took a look at System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts.  I could see that a lot of Windows fonts were not present on the list there.  So in Windows XP, I went to C:\Windows\Fonts.  I selected and copied everything to another, temporary folder called UbuFonts.  In UbuFonts, I sorted by file type and deleted the ones that were not TTF files.  Back in Ubuntu, I typed “sudo nautilus” and went to /usr/share/fonts/truetype.  It already had a folder called msttcorefonts, but with only a fraction of the fonts that I had just copied from C:\Windows\Fonts to UbuFonts, and the font files there seemed older and smaller.  I made a backup copy of the msttcorefonts folder and then copied everything from UbuFonts into /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts.  Now System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts had a much wider selection.  I changed the fonts to Tahoma 10 and the monospace to Courier 10.  Tahoma allowed me to see more information on each line onscreen.

Another tweak from Gizmo called for some playing around with Compiz.  This was a bad idea, as described in a separate post.  Another tweak of interest was to clean up the GRUB boot menu.  I typed “uname -r” and saw that I was using the 2.6.32-22-generic-pae kernel.  In Synaptic, I searched for linux-image, clicked at the top of the left-hand column to sort by those that were installed, and marked for removal all numbered items other than that kernel.  In this case, that included just two items:  linux-image-2.6.31-21-generic-pae and linux-image-2.6.32-22.generic (i.e., not pae).  I did another search for linux-headers and marked all non-2.6.32-22-generic-pae items there too.  In this case, trying to remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22 threatened to remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22-generic-pae as well; but I wanted to keep that, so I didn’t remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22.  On restart, I saw that GRUB now listed just the 2.6.32-22-generic-pae kernel and its recovery mode, along with memtest and Windows XP (it was a dual-boot machine).  I went back into Ubuntu without a problem.  I did later have a VMware problem that might have been related to this, though.

Gizmo also pointed me toward a number of recommended freeware apps.  These were for the KDE (not GNOME) desktop.  I thought it might be time to try KDE, if only to check out these programs.  One was the Wally wallpaper changer, which I installed through Synaptic.  Getting Wally (and the whole KDE desktop) involved a total of 91 files.  Other interesting pieces of Gizmo-recommended software I got through Synaptic:  gtk-recordMyDesktop and Dolphin file manager.  Downloaded directly from creators’ websites, I got Wink, FreeFile Sync, and Parted Magic.  I did consider using Dropbox as well, because of its good reviews (by e.g., PC Magazine, Online Backup Tools, Laptop, and alternativeTo; but I decided that Windows Live Sync had important advantages even though I would have to run it in a virtual machine when I was booted into Ubuntu.

(Note:  a few days later -- possibly the first time I tried it after installing KDE -- Google Desktop search was no longer responding to its default Ctrl-Ctrl hotkey.  That is, its Quick Search Box was not coming up.  Something I saw on some webpage, as I was trying to fix that problem, made me wonder whether the KDE installation was to blame.  A tip that fixed it was to open the Google Desktop Search preferences and change the hotkey to Ctrl-F1.)

The last thing to do, in this round of tweaking, was to clean out unnecessary stuff from the drive on which I had installed Ubuntu, so that I could make a backup image in case I needed to reinstall – so that I could just restore the image, that is, instead of having to go back through all these steps.  This, I thought, called for something like the TreeSize utility that I had used in Windows to see where I might have files or folders taking up huge amounts of space.  Among what seemed to be several possibilities, I found an actual Linux version of TreeSize, so I downloaded that – but I also discovered Ubuntu’s Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyzer, whose Treemap Chart was especially interesting.  These revealed that my Ubuntu installation was not presently very large, so I didn’t have to worry too much about shrinking it for this particular image.  It also revealed that by far the largest space hog, within that installation, was the Google Desktop index of stuff on my hard drive, at 5.2GB.  I did see that the Google Chrome cache was also taking 400MB.  I went into Chrome’s Settings (the wrench icon at the upper-right corner) > Options but didn’t see any way to control that, other than to just clear the cache.  I decided to leave it for now, and changed some other settings while I was there.  And that was it.  Ubuntu 10.04 was tweaked, at least for now.

Installing 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 -- Additional Tweaks

In a previous post (and in a couple of comments after it), I described the steps I took to downgrade from 64-bit (x64) to 32-bit (x32) Ubuntu 9.10 (a/k/a Karmic Koala), including installation of VMware Workstation 7 and other programs.  This post describes further installation and adjustment steps that I took as time went by.

To make more vertical space, I moved Ubuntu's top panel to the left side of the screen.  To do this, I right-clicked on the panel and went to Properties > General tab > Orientation.  While I was there, I also unchecked Expand and checked Autohide and Show hide buttons.  In previous installations, I had found that sometimes a panel would misbehave on startup.  To fix that, I would just come back to these options and check and then uncheck Expand.  (To get to these options on the revised left panel, I would right-click the Hide button at the top of the panel.)  I had experimented with moving the bottom panel to the right side of the screen, but there were some panel items (e.g., date, weather) that required reading, and reading was easier when I left them on the bottom.  I made the bottom panel more consistent with Windows XP by moving the shutoff button to the bottom left corner, from its original location on the top right corner, and also by moving the date to the bottom right corner.  To move these items from the (formerly top) left panel, I right-clicked on them and chose Remove From Panel.  Then I went to the bottom panel and used right-click > Add to Panel and selected Clock and Shut Down.  To relocate them on the bottom panel, I used right-click > Move, and then put the hand on the part of the panel where I wanted them to be and clicked again. To move items that were already on a panel, I had to right-click > uncheck Lock to Panel, then move the hand to the panel location where I wanted the item, click there, and go back in and Lock to Panel again.  To move some items, I had to look for the icon consisting of three tiny grey marks and right-click on that.  That included, on the bottom panel, the entire set of buttons for currently open programs.

While I was revising panels, I added Drawer to the left panel.  Then I right-clicked on Drawer and chose Add to Drawer.  This was for infrequently used items that needed to be horizontal (for reading), and that therefore belonged in a Drawer on the left rather than bottom panel.  For now, the only such item was Character Palette.  On the rough principle that the left panel was for applications and the bottom panel was for WinXP imitation and for everything else, I also added Force Quit to the left panel.  To the bottom, I added Disk Mounter (in a Drawer), Lock Screen, Sticky Notes, and Weather Report.  For some of these items, there were Preferences that could be adjusted. There were some items that could not be added to panels in the normal way.  Specifically, I wanted a copy of the Places > Computer icon on the left panel.  To get it there, I went to Places > Computer and click-dragged the icon to the panel.

I ran into a problem with VMware Workstation 7 performance.  I had downgraded to the 32-bit of Workstation, so that it would run on 32-bit Ubuntu.  It seemed that the lower RAM capacity of 32-bit operating systems might be to blame.  I worked through that problem in a separate post.  The solution was to use a PAE kernel, which can recognize more RAM.  Otherwise, the next major step in this process was to upgrade, some months later, to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).