Yesterday, I tried some weird things and modified some configuration files. When I started the PC, I was dropped to recovery shell with ramfs$ prompt. Bad Luck! I searched Google, and found an article which gave me an idea on how to proceed with recovery.

First I created a USB bootable disk with Arch ISO. I started the PC from USB and I was dropped into working shell. Mounted my original partitions in a folder and issued chroot.

mkdir /mnt/oldroot
mkdir /mnt/oldroot/boot
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/oldroot/boot
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/oldroot
chroot /mnt/oldroot


Then I corrected the mistake and rebuilt kernel image.
mkinitcpio -p kernel26

It gave some error, saying that some of the files could not be accessed while processing automount. But it properly generated fallback image. I rebooted the PC, this time without the help of USB and chose Fallback from grub. I issued mkinitcpio command again and  rebooted. My PC is back to the original state.

Edit: Link to original article, Arch Linux Recovery

Windows 7 RC1

Microsoft released first Release Candidate of their brand new Operating System Windows 7, in the beginning of this month. The RC1 will not expire for an entire year! Yes, Microsoft is in Damage Control Mode after bad reviews it got for Windows Vista! Even my laptop came with Windows Vista pre-installed. I used it for one year, till the warranty expired and then switched to Linux. This time around, I heard very good reviews of Windows 7 and decided to give it a try.

Anyone can download a copy of Windows 7 RC1 from Microsoft website for free and use it for one full year. You will get all the updates. The download is a DVD image of size 2.35G.  It did not take my much time to download but I had to burn the image on a DVD to give it a try. The install screen looks very nice and completes without much problem. The install was completed in 15 minutes approximately. The computer restarted three times during the install.

The first thing you notice in the new Windows is the Startup Screen. It looks awesome. The artwork of Windows has made considerable progress in the last few years. The system booted to new desktop with very thick taskbar and large icons. Since Vista, Microsoft made so many changes in the menu appearance and positioning of the menu items – which to me is very perplexing at first. You need to get adjusted to find the things out and may spend a lot of time initially to get the things right. There are a couple of good themes also. Overall the looks seems to be attractive at first.

The I tried to play some songs and videos. MP3 songs played without any problem. But the problem started when I played a video in some other format. It failed to play. I heard that Windows 7 will support most of the codes native. I was out of luck this time. I checked the memory usage – it was 544 MB. My laptop comes with Intel 945 Express Chipset. So the graphic performance was not that good. I think you need a separate video card to make the best use of Windows 7. Another issue – I don’t know if I can call this an issue – is that I was unable to open any office document. I am not asking Microsoft to include Office Suite in Windows 7, but they could have included at least Word, Excel and PowerPint and Visio viewers in this. One need to either buy Office or download Open Office to view documents.

In general, I could not see any drastic improvement in the performance of my machine with 1G of RAM. It may work perfectly for people who have got separate video card and more memory, but not for me. One thing Microsoft has done good is the installation size of the OS. It was using less than 7G of hard disk space compared to 10G used by Windows Vista. There may be some services which can be turned off and you can increase the performance. But I did not have the patience to do those things. I shut down the PC and started installing linux – Windows 7 disappointed me. I gave the installation disk to my friend also, who tried it on is AMD machine. He was not at all impressed with Windows and he too removed the Windows installation within an hour. His graphics card was not properly detected – something which you never expect with Windows. I will give it a score of 6/10. It is not for me, at least.

Linux Mint 7 RC

When Linux Mint 7 Gloria (Release Candidate) was announced, I downloaded it immediately. After I installed Windows 7, I decided to remove it and installed Linux Mint 7 RC. The download size of ISO is 686M. I made a boot able USB with UNetBootin. I restarted the system and bootted from USB disk. The Live CD (rather USB), was very quick and I was presented with a very smooth looking desktop in minutes. I started the installer, which asked me a few questions. I selected custom disk partitioning and ext4 is the default file system in this release. The installation completed in 3-4 minutes and I restarted the PC.

The initial boot took around 2 minutes, but the subsequent boots took very little time. There is an improvement in the boot response. The new theme which comes with Gloria looks awesome and the Login Manager also looks impressive. Above all, the system was very fast. The memory usage was 190M and the processor usage was around 7% on both the cores on the default GNOME desktop. The new Mint Menu is also very impressive. I however, chose the classical one as I was accustomed to the old one. The bigger test came when I started playing media files. Every file format in my notebook was played correctly. I did not have to install any codec. Also, most of the applications you need comes pre-installed, including OpenOffice 3.0. The only changes I did was adjusting the icon zoom size to 66% and adjusting the font size to 9px. Font size of 10px looked too big for me. The distro is very stable and is ready for everyday use. It comes with Python 2.6 which disappoints may people because of some backward incompatible changes made in the language. I would give Gloria a score of 9.5/10.

I have one complaint about major linux distributions. The directory structure is very confusing for the normal user. If someone new to the linux comes and see file structure he will not understand any thing. The folder names need to be more descriptive. Folder names like bin, root, home, dev, etc, sbin etc. confuses many users and does not make a very good impression. Apple has done a great thing by changing the folder names in Mac OS. Although Mac OS is built on top of BSD, it does not carry the folder naming convention used by BSD or Unix. That has, in my opinion, contributed a lot to the success of Mac.

Now I am using Linux Mint 7 RC at my home and Windows XP at work. For me Linux Mint is the linux distro which can be a brand ambassador for linux. It has got everything to satisfy a new user coming to the linux world! Welcome to the world of Choice and Freedom!

Valentine's Day Offer From Times Of India

Here are some plus points I have noticed in Linux:

• It uses very less memory, even with GNOME loaded. Windows Vista used to eat up ~700M while, Ubuntu 8.04 takes as little as 480M.
• The start up time is very less.
• It is very stable. It doesn’t crash like Windows do.
• No need for an anti-virus software.
• You have an excellent community support for any problems you face.

Even then, my experience was not smooth as one may think. Here are some of the problems I faced.

• Many software vendors make software only for Windows and Linux. So you are sure to miss some of your favourite applications. (You can use Wine for running Windows applications)
• I was using 64 bit version, so I faced some problems. (Like crashing waking up from sleep, some applications are available only for 32 bit OS etc.)
• There was a learning curve, which may not be acceptable for some one who want to get things up and running from the word go.
• I needed some time to find the right applications for each purpose. This is because there are lot of applications available for each purpose. You need to find the one which suits your need.
• There were some problems with audio codecs and video playback at times.

But overall, I am satisfied with my windows experience. One of the important reason why I stick to Ubuntu Linux is that I don’t need to wait for some time after the OS has started. Under windows, you have to wait for sometime for all the start up applications to load. Most significantly, you can see icons loading in system tray, one by one. Under Linux, my system is ready to use right after the login.

Everything is working fine. I have stolen this wallpaper from OpenSuse desktop. Although the beta version is a bit unstable, I am happy with the way everything is working. What excites me is that I have not touched my Windows Vista Installation for the last one week.

As I mentioned in the last post, the only thing I miss in Linux is Windows Live Writer. But there is something which makes life easier. Guess what? It is the new version of WordPress. This is a much awaited version of wordpress which comes after six months of hard work. The new interface is very pleasing. The upgrade to the new version was very smooth and everything worked without any problem. The new interface makes it very easy to manage the common tasks easy. It provides me the easy interface to compose a new post without any hassles. I am happy with this web version, because I have got 24×7 Internet access now, which makes my life easy. Not having a dedicated Internet connection was one of the reasons why I preferred to use Windows Live Writer earlier.

PS: If you thought of switching to Linux, then be sure to read an article, Linux Is NOT Windows. This is a must read article for everyone who has some kind of interest in Linux.