This is annoying. I’m attempting to get to my photos on my Win 7 desktop from my Linux laptop. It works in Win XP clients, but smbclient is failing:

[evan@ehoffman ~]$ smbclient -L //192.168.10.105/
Enter evan's password:
Domain=[EVAN-WOLFDALE7] OS=[Windows 7 Ultimate 7100] Server=[Windows 7 Ultimate 6.1]

	Sharename       Type      Comment
	---------       ----      -------
Error returning browse list: NT_STATUS_NOT_SUPPORTED
session request to 192.168.10.105 failed (Called name not present)
session request to 192 failed (Called name not present)
session request to *SMBSERVER failed (Called name not present)
NetBIOS over TCP disabled -- no workgroup available
[evan@ehoffman ~]$

Update: This appears to be resolved in Samba 3.4.3 (release notes). Since there’s no RPM for 3.4.2 for FC11 I downloaded the source and built it and tried the smbclient against my Win7 box and it worked fine.

My work laptop, which I got around the end of 2006, was starting to run like crap. Pretty sure it started around the time I put antivirus on it, which reinforces my theory that antivirus is a virus itself. Anyway, being bored with Windows XP and having already played with Windows 7 at home, I decided to install Linux. The last time I tried Linux desktop was around RedHat 7.3, which was a long time ago… pre-Fedora even. I’m pretty happy with CentOS on the server side and was set to try CentOS 5.3 on my laptop when someone suggested I go with FC due to more bleeding-edge driver support. Even though the hardware is pretty old at this point I figured it was worth a shot.

Generally everything works pretty well. Everything pretty much works out of the box – I had dual screens up at native resolution, it even recognized my phone as a camera when I plugged it in to charge it. Best of all, I was able to resize the NTFS partition (rather than blowing it away) so I can still boot back to XP when the need arises.

There are 2 problems I’ve had so far though:

• the computer now hovers between 76 and 85 degrees Celsius, whereas under Win XP it generally peaked around 68 C. I tried underclocking the CPU down to 250 MHz but the problem persisted.
• The Java plugin for Firefox … wtf? How can this not work? I downloaded Sun’s JDK and symlinked the libjavaplugin_whatever into /usr/lib64/mozilla/whatever/ and that didn’t work. Then I tried “yum install java-plugin” or something like that and that installed some OpenJava-ish plugin which looked like it was going to work, but when I logged into the Raritan KVM and clicked “Connect” it wouldn’t work. I booted up Win XP in a VM and Firefox with Java works fine. Really annoying and dumb.

I’ll probably try Ubuntu tomorrow as several people suggested it runs cooler than Fedora. If that fails then I guess I’ll go to Win7 after all. I also want an SSD for my work laptop now… my Windows VM seems to spent eternity spinning my crappy 5400 rpm drive. Plox.

So I’ve been having problems with my computer since I built it. In particular the screen will freeze up from time to time with this checkerboard of black and normal. I can’t really describe it, and since the computer’s frozen when it happens, I can’t screenshot it. Anyway, I reinstalled XP a while ago and that didn’t do anything to solve it.

On Thursday my computer started really pissing me off because when I plugged in my camera, the Canon CameraWindow app that I use to transfer stuff off wasn’t autostarting. When I then tried starting it manually it still wouldn’t start. When I opened “My Computer” what greeted me was a flashlight, apparently searching for the innards of my system. It searched for about 60 seconds before showing me the correct contents of the computer, but when I closed My Computer and reopened it, it did the same thing. This persisted through a reboot. So I had a bad feeling that maybe the computer was about to do something unpleasant.

This probably doesn’t sound like enough of a reason to ditch the whole OS and install a beta as a primary OS, but I was already kind of sick of running a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware; my computer has 4 GB of memory and XP was only able to see 3.25. So I resized my 1 TB partition down to 500 GB and installed build 7100 of Windows 7 in the free space. I assume this will allow me to boot back to XP when I want to, but I haven’t tried it.

Anyway, the install went fine — my computer’s performance score is only 5.9 out of 7.9, I guess due to disk performance — though it did spend a lot of time doing absolutely nothing, which made me think it was hanging. I’m not crazy about this taskbar, and I miss the Quick Launch bar from XP. Also not a fan of the Program selector in the Start menu. I’ve never liked “personalized” menus; I like to know where something is always going to be rather than having the computer populate a list for convenience. There are some other minor annoyances but overall it seems pretty fast – Firefox started up very anyway, and that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve installed so far.

One problem I ran into was trying to connect to my old Linux box via Samba. It wasn’t accepting my password no matter what I did; I reset it on the server and it still wasn’t working. A quick Google search turned up a solution: Get Vista and Samba to work. This post is from 2006 and it’s now 2009 and it’s still a problem, so I guess Microsoft doesn’t consider it a problem. My Samba installation is way older than that, though, so maybe it’s more of a Samba issue than a Vista one.

The other thing, which wasn’t as much of a problem as something that just sucked, is I had to reauthorize my computer in iTunes. I copied over all my settings – this page explained what goes where – but I still had to reauthorize the computer. I guess I could have dug further, but I just assumed that going from Windows 5.1 to 6.1 and 32-bit to 64-bit, there’s no way to “trick” it. This is only my 2nd authorized computer though so it’s not a big deal… just annoying, since it’s not a second computer.

Anyway, back to my original problem: the camera now works as expected. That reminds me of another problem I had – I couldn’t run my Java program to reorganize the pics for some reason. It turned out that even though I had a 64-bit JVM installed, and Java is supposedly platform independent, I need to download 64-bit Eclipse. Then I just had to hunt down the old jars and put them back in the classpath of my project and that worked well.

So overall I’m pleased with the speed and responsiveness, and the Aero stuff is pretty, but I don’t get the taskbar changes.