Looks More Like a Puma

Since I have a little  time to screw  around, I thought I would look into setting up the Windows 7 Release Candidate somewhere so I could play around with it. Downloading, of course, was a piece of cake. Luckily I was able to remember my MS account information so I didn’t have to create a new one. While I was poking around the website I did find the answer to a question I’d had: how do they plan to keep people from just using the release candidate instead  of buying the finished os?

Watch the calendar. The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to install a non-expired version of Windows before March 1, 2010. You’ll also need to install the programs and data that you want to use. (Learn more about installing Windows.)

They thought about having a warning dialog to the effect of “Your Operating System will expire in only 3 month(s)”, but decided forcibly shutting down the computer every 2 hours would better prove  their dedication to customer satisfaction.

While the download was running, I started  thinking about where  I wanted to put the os. I considered a virtual machine, but that  didn’t work so great when I tried the Windows 7 Beta and they’re really slow. Meanwhile I’ve got 113 unused  gigs on my harddrive. I figured I could spare 20 or so for a Windows partition.

That decided, I didn’t like the idea of partitioning my hd and installing a windows without having my stuff backed up. Because I loaned out my external harddrive, I elected to back up stuff to the hd of my old laptop. Curiously, that machine balked on boot, claiming a disk read error. Since I currently have my flash drive  set up as a bootable Ubuntu 9.04 stick, I just stuck that in and booted it.

I didn’t really expect the wireless to work out of the box and was preparing to go digging for an ethernet cable, but when I tried the network manager, it connected without any finagling at all. Sharing on the harddrive was not quite as  easy. It took me a little while to realize that I couldn’t see the computer on the lan because it  didn’t have any shared folders. When I tried to share a folder, Ubuntu told me I needed to install samba. Luckily I had some space on the usb  stick, so that was done with a click. Next, it told me  that I couldn’t share a folder  I didn’t own. That is, I couldn’t do that unless I added a line to the config file that said I could. That too was quickly accomplished, and I was shortly able to find my destination folder on the lan.

With that, I am copying 41.6GB which Nautilus tells me will take 12 more  hours at 1000KB/s.

To  be   continued…