The charging pins on my BlackBerry Pearl went south a couple of days ago, and instead of spending $79 to replace and upgrade that, I spent $399 for an iPhone. Whoever is doing the marketing over there… So now I’ve had it about 24 hours, and to be honest, I’m not sure how much I love it. It sure is pretty and fun to poke at, but there are a lot of things missing. Of course, it’s specifically designed to be crippled for Windows users, and that’s part of the issue, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to replace my PC with a Mac as well, just to get the complete iPhone experience…

Matt was raving about how great the latest release of Ubuntu Linux is, and I thought it might be good to try it out before spending a bunch of money to switch to MacOS, so I decided to install it on my main Windows XP desktop in a dual-boot setup. Should be easy, right?

Yeah, right.

First of all, even though Ubuntu comes nicely packaged up, if you do a quick search for “dual boot Ubuntu Windows XP” you get a ton of very technical explanations of how to accomplish what should be a built-in option in the installer.

As it turns out, I managed to blow away the Windows Master Boot Record (MBR). Not only that, but since I had failed to install the Linux boot manager (GRUB) correctly, neither OS would boot. Luckily, I could still boot from the Linux CD that I had created, and I also had two other PC’s in the house (although neither of them have a CD-R drive). Looking at this page, I saw that perhaps if I could get to the pre-boot GRUB command line, I could tell GRUB to “chainload” and get through to Windows, even without the “Master Boot Record”…

As is typical, the instructions weren’t quite right, but I deciphered them and managed to make it work. The page says do this: rootnoverify(0,0) chainloader +1 boot

And what I had to do was this: rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1 boot

Which is close, but how is the average Joe supposed to figure that out? Anyhow, that got me back into Windows. Now I just had to figure out how to restore the MBR. Googling that led here, which essentially says that you have to run the Windows Recovery Console, which of course is only available is you have an original Windows XP SP2 CD, which of course I don’t have.

Or do I? I do have an SP2 disk that Dell sent me a while back… But the computer won’t boot off that CD… I search windows help for “Recovery Console” and it tells me that I can install Recovery Console to be run off the hard drive by doing this: E:\I386\WINNT32.EXE /cmdcons

That appears to work, when I run it from the copy of XP2 on the Dell CD. Now I just have to get to the right boot menu… to do that I have to go through the GRUB chainloader thing again, but then there it is… and now it wants the “Administrator” password. Ha. So I suppose have to go back into Windows itself, reset the Administrator password, and then go back into the Recovery Console. Each of these reboots takes 3-5 minutes, of course.

And I’m finally in the magical Recovery Console. Wow. And fixmbr exists, and produces the expected terrifying warning message, accompanied by a promising “The new master boot record has been successfully written.” I started to run fixboot also, but the warning message scared me off, and as it turned out, I didn’t need to.

So, I reboot again, and it appears that the Windows MBR was in fact restored, and I can boot Windows again.

Great, now how to get back to the copy of Linux that I installed 4 hours ago? Useless. Better to trash that install (delete those partitions), and try again fresh.

…that didn’t work… The Linux installer doesn’t seem to know where to put GRUB to make it work. By now I gather that (it appears that) GRUB is supposed to install itself on the MBR and take over from the Windows boot loader, it’s not doing that. So now I have a broken MBR and a broken GRUB as well, again. Now I find something called “Super Grub Disk” that is bootable and is supposed to repair all this mess. It doesn’t, at least not automatically… But now it’s clear that you can muck with all this, and fix it. I now appear to have GRUB on the MBR, and then again in my Linux partition, the first pointing to the other, and neither work. So I boot into Windows Recovery Console again, and restore the Windows MBR, again.

And around and around… Finally I pick up a clue from the error messages that GRUB is giving me trying to boot either OS, and I reboot into Linux via the Live CD and manage to figure out with the help of these instructions how to find and edit the menu.lst that controls what how GRUB does its thing. Basically GRUB was looking at the wrong disk (hd1,7 instead of hd0,7), and once I changed that around in the config file it was able to do its thing. Now I have GRUB as the primary boot loader – if I select Linux it boots Linux and if I select Windows it boots Windows (now of course with the added sub-menu of Windows’ own boot loader showing the option of Windows Recovery Console…)

Who knows how all this crap works, but at least I have them both running now.

On a final note, let me just say that these three pages, while apparently popular with the general public, are entirely useless in terms of figuring out anything meaningful about setting up an XP/Ubuntu dual-boot situation.

I’ve been using FireFox for a few years, but in the last few months I’ve noticed it getting slower and slower. Opening a new tab often takes several seconds, navigating around and loading pages is also slow, and there are often sub-second hangups while typing in textareas and such. After re-visiting CyberNotes: Firefox Extensions cause Memory Leaks and Crashes, I have disabled Google Browser Sync again – that had caused problems in the past.

Of course, saying that “FireFox has still become too slow” is mostly a perception issue. Apps don’t get slower over time; usually it’s that we’re trying to do more with them – and that is exactly the case with FireFox (or whatever browser). Whereas it used to be just that, a browser, now it’s email, word processing, calendar, task list, maps, news, and whatever else – usually all open at once in multiple tabs, plus various add-ons and GreaseMonkey scripts. So on one hand it’s no surprise that the whole thing appears slower – although you’d think 3Gb of RAM would mitigate that to a large degree. Makes me wonder if FireFox can be configured to use more memory…

I got a new printer. Whoo. I got it because the last one I bought didn’t have a document feeder, and that would be a nice convenience to have now and then. The new one also does duplex printer, although rather slowly. So great, new printer. Well, it also came with a couple of features that, by way of the fact that Windows is such a POS, are instead bugs. The printer has a couple of (to me, entirely useless) memory-card reader slots. Windows, of course, sees these and tries to assign them drive letter(s)… well, something about this conflicts with how Windows iTunes mounts my iPod (also using a drive letter), so that if the printer is attached, the PC won’t recognize the iPod at all. I have to unplug the printer to get the PC to recognize the iPod, and if the iPod is connected and I reconnect the printer, the printer driver software starts complaining that I’ve connected an “incompatible device” to the printer. Eh, yeah. Not. Somehow I know this isn’t the fault of Canon, or Apple. It’s Windows. Feh.

I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, but it seems certain that the forthcoming launch of Microsoft’s latest non-release will drive folks looking for a *real* upgrade to Max OS X and the Apple platform. It just seems so pathetic! Another lame reskinning with no real features, and the same old bass-ackwards take on usability. If these are the “11 reasons to give Vista a chance“, MS should be embarrassed. In fact, it seems like they’re already scrambling to get out a follow-up release – although I don’t see how this could really be much more promising.

I installed Google Desktop since it’s been updated to index (in particular) Thunderbird email… used it for a couple of days, and now it’s gone, gone, gone until they fix the performance issues. I was getting all sorts of delays opening and saving files, and just navigating around the OS. I have a gig of RAM and a fast PC, it’s not that – it was Google Desktop. I removed it and thank god, things are back to normal. Great functionality, but not ready for prime time. I think the big G blew it on this one and released too early. Even if it’s labeled “Beta”, people will form a negative impression. I’ll try it again when the next version is ready.

I just managed to get my little Motorola HS820 working as a headset on my desktop PC. This O’Reilly article on Getting Your Bluetooth Headset to Work in XP was helpful – although I didn’t have to install new drivers, the step-by-step was useful, and once I switched over the audio in/out devices in the Control Panel, system sounds, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and MSN Messenger all work fine over Bluetooth. Sweet!

For some reason I still haven’t been able to make it work on my little Thinkpad X40, probably because it’s running SP1 & a different BT stack…