Since this blog printed an article two years ago about using the Group Policy Editor to kill the desktop icons, it seemed worth adding that this feature, at some point, slipped into the right click context menu for the desktop. Just right click on the desktop. Under arrange icons, there is an entry to show/unshow icons. Not sure how long it's been there, whether it arrived at RTM or SP1. But it's there now.
This isn't the same as the GPE hack we described earlier, because the desktop is still alive. The right click menu is still there and you can turn them back on. But for many people, it achieves the result of decluttering. If security is what you were after, use GPE.
Better yet, use a better shell.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Blackbox. A truly great window manager/shell replacement for Windows.
Blackbox is a re-implementation of a window manager for X11/Xorg, which itself came out as a response to the increasing weight and complexity of Gnome and KDE. The focus from day one was fast and simple, and that has been retained in the several windows versions. It is well maintained, and fully supports 64-bit oddities such as having two program folders and two collections of control panel applets. It's pretty, but that's not the point. It's fast, and it's out of your way.
Blackbox implements everything you need in a shell, including system tray functionality. It’s astonishingly fast and smooth, without a hint of response lag on even the most antiquated system. Systray apps load in the background. You don’t have to wait for everything in there to load to get a menu and start working. So if you’re removing useful things from the tray not because you’re out of memory, but just out of patience, you can stop now. Or you can kill the tray altogether. You can do anything you want, really. Windows is yours. Welcome home.
Multiple desktops are implemented cleanly in a classic X11 way. You may or may not choose to skin windows, which both covers the ancient classic window treatment, and also implements more classic X11 behaviors such as window shading, stickiness, and always on top. While skinning may sound bloated, the way it’s done here is not. Styles are described in text files, and rendered on the fly by the same internal mechanism which draws the menus. Fast algorithms take color A and color B, renders a gradient, interlace, or flat surface, bevels the edges, and wraps the windows. It happens so fast and cleanly that you won’t see any tearing or artifacts on an old NetBurst Celeron with embedded graphics, let alone in a modern system. Skinning is optional, it should be noted. If you use aero, with or without uxtheme patches and third party visual styles, you may choose to skip the skinning, though of course you also lose the quick access to shade, stick, and always on top. Skinning can be odd with applications which implement their own management widgets, such as Adobe CS5, latest Firefox releases, and Google Chrome. Firefox can be made to work with skinning with a couple of changes to the arrangement of toolbars, or excluding, and Chrom, Illustrator, and Photoshop can be excluded easily.
Configuration is via some simple text files, which resemble nothing so much as old .ini files from 3.11, for those of you gray of beard enough to remember. Functionality is completely modular, via a plugin architecture. Not only is it extensible, but if you must, even the core functionality is mostly replaceable. By default, we receive a clean layout in which start menu like functionality is available via a right click on the desktop, window listing via a middle click. A thin system bar offers a clock, tray, and tasks and desktop switching via the rodent.
You can fiddle with it in your spare time for a week, get everything just so, and keep it on a keychain to drop on any new install you may have. It’s a little work to get set up once, but you only have to do it once. If you set up your menus to use proper shell expansions instead of hard paths (%SYSTEMROOT%, etc.) you’ll have minimal work to do to carry it around.
Most of the code is GPL. The rendering engine described above is BSD. The plugin architecture is carefully designed to allow linking into non-free code without license pollution.
Get grischka’s bbLean here. Get qwilk’s xoblite here. The xoblite site also features a fairly comprehensive list of plugins, which for the most part work with any other >.70 release of blackbox.exe. The most active forum appears to be lostinthebox.com, which covers both windows and X11 versions, and various forks. The activity in these communities seems to fluctuate around the need for a new release. I suppose everyone just gets back to their real job once the update is passed around and debugged. We’ve had to ask a question once that wasn’t covered in the included documentation. It was during the 32->64 transition, years ago.
To give an example of just how light this thing really is, my total installed folder is currently 1.8 MB. There’s some cruft in there, unused plugins, wallpapers. . . if I were to clean it out for only current core functionality, it would fit on a floppy. Even comprehensive documentation is in there.
OK, strictly speaking, Blackbox for Windows is everything but a window manager. While the shell is modular in Windows, just not advertised as such, window management is core, as evidenced by how ‘server core’ comes up to a terminal in a window on a classic aqua background. Details.
Even as we work on this article, we see announcements that newer code is coming under the name of BBClean at bb4win.org. Qwilk is also promising fresh xoblite. Grischka might respond with newer bbLean soon after. This of course, is part of the beauty of an open source shell. Several parties are working on core functionality. When they release, the good stuff quickly makes its way into the other releases. When the various developers drop out for a while, or forever, nothing is lost. But give this a run for a couple hours one evening, and you'll be lost in the box. There is no return. Get a USB keycahin drive to carry it around on, because after a week, you'll never want to see the taskbar again.
In this author's particular configuration, it looks like this:
Blackbox implements everything you need in a shell, including system tray functionality. It’s astonishingly fast and smooth, without a hint of response lag on even the most antiquated system. Systray apps load in the background. You don’t have to wait for everything in there to load to get a menu and start working. So if you’re removing useful things from the tray not because you’re out of memory, but just out of patience, you can stop now. Or you can kill the tray altogether. You can do anything you want, really. Windows is yours. Welcome home.
Multiple desktops are implemented cleanly in a classic X11 way. You may or may not choose to skin windows, which both covers the ancient classic window treatment, and also implements more classic X11 behaviors such as window shading, stickiness, and always on top. While skinning may sound bloated, the way it’s done here is not. Styles are described in text files, and rendered on the fly by the same internal mechanism which draws the menus. Fast algorithms take color A and color B, renders a gradient, interlace, or flat surface, bevels the edges, and wraps the windows. It happens so fast and cleanly that you won’t see any tearing or artifacts on an old NetBurst Celeron with embedded graphics, let alone in a modern system. Skinning is optional, it should be noted. If you use aero, with or without uxtheme patches and third party visual styles, you may choose to skip the skinning, though of course you also lose the quick access to shade, stick, and always on top. Skinning can be odd with applications which implement their own management widgets, such as Adobe CS5, latest Firefox releases, and Google Chrome. Firefox can be made to work with skinning with a couple of changes to the arrangement of toolbars, or excluding, and Chrom, Illustrator, and Photoshop can be excluded easily.
Configuration is via some simple text files, which resemble nothing so much as old .ini files from 3.11, for those of you gray of beard enough to remember. Functionality is completely modular, via a plugin architecture. Not only is it extensible, but if you must, even the core functionality is mostly replaceable. By default, we receive a clean layout in which start menu like functionality is available via a right click on the desktop, window listing via a middle click. A thin system bar offers a clock, tray, and tasks and desktop switching via the rodent.
You can fiddle with it in your spare time for a week, get everything just so, and keep it on a keychain to drop on any new install you may have. It’s a little work to get set up once, but you only have to do it once. If you set up your menus to use proper shell expansions instead of hard paths (%SYSTEMROOT%, etc.) you’ll have minimal work to do to carry it around.
Most of the code is GPL. The rendering engine described above is BSD. The plugin architecture is carefully designed to allow linking into non-free code without license pollution.
Get grischka’s bbLean here. Get qwilk’s xoblite here. The xoblite site also features a fairly comprehensive list of plugins, which for the most part work with any other >.70 release of blackbox.exe. The most active forum appears to be lostinthebox.com, which covers both windows and X11 versions, and various forks. The activity in these communities seems to fluctuate around the need for a new release. I suppose everyone just gets back to their real job once the update is passed around and debugged. We’ve had to ask a question once that wasn’t covered in the included documentation. It was during the 32->64 transition, years ago.
To give an example of just how light this thing really is, my total installed folder is currently 1.8 MB. There’s some cruft in there, unused plugins, wallpapers. . . if I were to clean it out for only current core functionality, it would fit on a floppy. Even comprehensive documentation is in there.
OK, strictly speaking, Blackbox for Windows is everything but a window manager. While the shell is modular in Windows, just not advertised as such, window management is core, as evidenced by how ‘server core’ comes up to a terminal in a window on a classic aqua background. Details.
Even as we work on this article, we see announcements that newer code is coming under the name of BBClean at bb4win.org. Qwilk is also promising fresh xoblite. Grischka might respond with newer bbLean soon after. This of course, is part of the beauty of an open source shell. Several parties are working on core functionality. When they release, the good stuff quickly makes its way into the other releases. When the various developers drop out for a while, or forever, nothing is lost. But give this a run for a couple hours one evening, and you'll be lost in the box. There is no return. Get a USB keycahin drive to carry it around on, because after a week, you'll never want to see the taskbar again.
In this author's particular configuration, it looks like this:
Friday, November 18, 2011
Automatically starting and stopping Virtual Box clients with the host.
Oracle's VirtualBox, originally developed by innotek, and aquired by Sun, has quickly developed a huge market share in relationship to industry standard VMware. By some reckonings, %60, though deployment count is notoriously hard to prove.
Why? Again, we hit this point again. Oracle has chosen to keep at least the core functionality available via GPLv2. A few other things that they don't have the right to license that way are available as a free (as in beer) download, including USB, RDP, and PXE booting.
When you first install VirtualBox, it appears to pretty much duplicate the functionality of VMware Workstation. Which would be cool enough, being open source, and given VMware's decisions about Server. Yes, I am aware that ESXi is also free beer. It also demands server class hardware. Which negates the cost savings, at least within the SOHO type of environment in which we work, consult, and write.
But there is So Much More. Along with the nice Qt (we'd have preferred gtk, but small potatoes) GUI for setting up clients and running them `application style,´ VirtualBox for Linux comes with command line controls to manipulate and run the VM clients from the console and in the background. Along with some trivial sysvinit hacking, we can run the clients at boot time, and shutdown or savestate them at shutdown and reboot.
Using the binaries VBoxHeadless and VBoxManage, along with a simple startup/shutdown script, here is how we accomplished this. As an aside, the script is based on the excellent tutorial at debian-administration.org.
Here's the script, as we're running it to launch our PBX in the background, in the rare occasion that the debian host has to go down.
In this example, 'telco' is the name of the script, taken from the hostname. 'Asterisk Appliance' is the name of the VM, as it's known to VBox. Run both VBoxHeadless and VBoxManage '-h' for more information about the various command line options available. They do a lot more than this. The man pages are comprehensive for both, as well.
After the script is created, and you've made sure you haven't left off the all important ampersand described in the notes below, run this to install the script.
Under current debian-testing (wheezy), the output of that command isn't the reassuring list of actions described at debian-administration.org, but rather, an dominous warning about LSB tags. But it works just the same. Check to see your new telco symlinks in rc2.d and rc0.d (it's in the other runlevels too, but these are the ones that count.) Reboot the machine to see your new automagic.
You can duplicate this script as many times as you need with new names for the script and the client OSs, to launch multiple VMs.
A couple of *important notes* are due. You can really scramble things by leaving off the job control character at the end of the loading command.
is just not the same without the ampersand (&). With it, it loads in the background. Without, and the following scripts will never load. Which means you'll never get to getty, and never get a login prompt. Hope you have ssh or gdm, and that they were set to load before, not after. Otherwise, you've got a bit of fun on your hands trying to get logged into a console to fix this. Probably, you'll be glad you have an ubuntu live cd handy. The other is, virtual machines are stored in the home folder of the user that creates them. The savvy and perfectionist hacker copies them and the relevant files from ~/.VirtualBox and ~/VirtualBox VMs to a special unprivileged user created just for this service. sudo -u drops the superuser permissions, and runs the commands as the specified user. The lazy hacker creates them and runs them as his day-to-day unprivileged user. One final note. This script is quick and dirty, and works. But it could and should be much better. The smarter script would check for the existence of the VM, check it's state, perform specific actions depending on whether it was last stopped, saved, or crashed out violently. It would check to see that the relevant vbox kernel modules are loaded. We just haven't gotten that far, and for the purposes of a novice level tutorial, it would be a long script, the core functionality of which would be obscured by the much longer sections of propriety.
Also, by default, update-rc.d installs the link in rc0.d in such a way that the script to unload vbox kernel modules runs before the machine is saved. Move K01virtualbox to K02virtualbox, or later, to give machines time to savestate before unloading modules. Otherwise module unloading fails. But it works just the same, except for the nasty red error flag. Not unloading them before reboot doesn't actually seem to affect functionality.
Why? Again, we hit this point again. Oracle has chosen to keep at least the core functionality available via GPLv2. A few other things that they don't have the right to license that way are available as a free (as in beer) download, including USB, RDP, and PXE booting.
When you first install VirtualBox, it appears to pretty much duplicate the functionality of VMware Workstation. Which would be cool enough, being open source, and given VMware's decisions about Server. Yes, I am aware that ESXi is also free beer. It also demands server class hardware. Which negates the cost savings, at least within the SOHO type of environment in which we work, consult, and write.
But there is So Much More. Along with the nice Qt (we'd have preferred gtk, but small potatoes) GUI for setting up clients and running them `application style,´ VirtualBox for Linux comes with command line controls to manipulate and run the VM clients from the console and in the background. Along with some trivial sysvinit hacking, we can run the clients at boot time, and shutdown or savestate them at shutdown and reboot.
Using the binaries VBoxHeadless and VBoxManage, along with a simple startup/shutdown script, here is how we accomplished this. As an aside, the script is based on the excellent tutorial at debian-administration.org.
Here's the script, as we're running it to launch our PBX in the background, in the rare occasion that the debian host has to go down.
! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/telco
#
# Some things that run always
touch /var/lock/telco
# Carry out specific functions when asked to by the system
case "$1" in
start)
echo "Loading telco in background. . . "
sudo -u waldo /usr/bin/VBoxHeadless -s Asterisk\ Appliance &;
;;
stop)
echo "Saving telco machine state before stopping host. . ."
sudo -u waldo VBoxManage controlvm Asterisk\ Appliance savestate
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/telco {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;
esac
In this example, 'telco' is the name of the script, taken from the hostname. 'Asterisk Appliance' is the name of the VM, as it's known to VBox. Run both VBoxHeadless and VBoxManage '-h' for more information about the various command line options available. They do a lot more than this. The man pages are comprehensive for both, as well.
After the script is created, and you've made sure you haven't left off the all important ampersand described in the notes below, run this to install the script.
update-rc.d telco defaults
Under current debian-testing (wheezy), the output of that command isn't the reassuring list of actions described at debian-administration.org, but rather, an dominous warning about LSB tags. But it works just the same. Check to see your new telco symlinks in rc2.d and rc0.d (it's in the other runlevels too, but these are the ones that count.) Reboot the machine to see your new automagic.
You can duplicate this script as many times as you need with new names for the script and the client OSs, to launch multiple VMs.
A couple of *important notes* are due. You can really scramble things by leaving off the job control character at the end of the loading command.
sudo -u waldo /usr/bin/VBoxHeadless -s Asterisk\ Appliance &;
is just not the same without the ampersand (&). With it, it loads in the background. Without, and the following scripts will never load. Which means you'll never get to getty, and never get a login prompt. Hope you have ssh or gdm, and that they were set to load before, not after. Otherwise, you've got a bit of fun on your hands trying to get logged into a console to fix this. Probably, you'll be glad you have an ubuntu live cd handy. The other is, virtual machines are stored in the home folder of the user that creates them. The savvy and perfectionist hacker copies them and the relevant files from ~/.VirtualBox and ~/VirtualBox VMs to a special unprivileged user created just for this service. sudo -u drops the superuser permissions, and runs the commands as the specified user. The lazy hacker creates them and runs them as his day-to-day unprivileged user. One final note. This script is quick and dirty, and works. But it could and should be much better. The smarter script would check for the existence of the VM, check it's state, perform specific actions depending on whether it was last stopped, saved, or crashed out violently. It would check to see that the relevant vbox kernel modules are loaded. We just haven't gotten that far, and for the purposes of a novice level tutorial, it would be a long script, the core functionality of which would be obscured by the much longer sections of propriety.
Also, by default, update-rc.d installs the link in rc0.d in such a way that the script to unload vbox kernel modules runs before the machine is saved. Move K01virtualbox to K02virtualbox, or later, to give machines time to savestate before unloading modules. Otherwise module unloading fails. But it works just the same, except for the nasty red error flag. Not unloading them before reboot doesn't actually seem to affect functionality.
uptime.exe - another little way to make windows feel like home
As I'm sure we all know, the biggest flaw (debatable) in Windows is that, for historical reasons, the text based console is busted and neglected. Why? I have yet to find a support article answering this.
But MS, as well as the Open Source community, offers a few tools to make it feel like the real computer it actually is. Here's a handy one that needs little explanation. uptime.exe. It does what you think it does. Nothing more or less. For those non-unixen out there, it tells how long your box has been up since last shutdown/reboot.
Get it at support.microsoft.com
OK, in relation to our comment that the console is busted, we feel compelled to note that PowerShell, a new text interface for 7 and its server variants, is not busted, and might even be a super-ninja. But, we already had a set of tools to this, and they're universal. So, in addition to remembering/learning a crippled set of console commands for DOS, we get to learn a new one for Windows greater than 6.1.
PowerShell will be covered in a later article. We promise.
But MS, as well as the Open Source community, offers a few tools to make it feel like the real computer it actually is. Here's a handy one that needs little explanation. uptime.exe. It does what you think it does. Nothing more or less. For those non-unixen out there, it tells how long your box has been up since last shutdown/reboot.
Get it at support.microsoft.com
OK, in relation to our comment that the console is busted, we feel compelled to note that PowerShell, a new text interface for 7 and its server variants, is not busted, and might even be a super-ninja. But, we already had a set of tools to this, and they're universal. So, in addition to remembering/learning a crippled set of console commands for DOS, we get to learn a new one for Windows greater than 6.1.
PowerShell will be covered in a later article. We promise.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
7zip - crushes and zips all other archivers.
Reader pl1ght added to the comments section on the article about Power Archiver a shout to take a look at 7zip for Windows. And after the final test, we have to say 7zip gets the win, all the way. It's not pretty or ugly. It's simple and fast. Best of all, it's Free and open, supports all the typical Windows and *NIX formats. For those concerned with it, it features better compression ratios than anything else, not just in the 7z format but even in plain old zip. In others words. WinRAR, you have been displaced. Finally, no more nag.
7zip is mostly licensed under LGPL, except for the unrar code, which is in more restrictive terms, as dictated by the rar developer. We prefer to take the open source solution here if there is one, so this is a big plus. Not just out of software politics (though we care about that) but also, for purely practical reasons. GPL stuff often produces the best code, and if its got more than a trivial user base, it's never orphaned.
Hosted on sourceforge, of course. Get it here.
7zip is mostly licensed under LGPL, except for the unrar code, which is in more restrictive terms, as dictated by the rar developer. We prefer to take the open source solution here if there is one, so this is a big plus. Not just out of software politics (though we care about that) but also, for purely practical reasons. GPL stuff often produces the best code, and if its got more than a trivial user base, it's never orphaned.
Hosted on sourceforge, of course. Get it here.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Removing Homegroups and/or Libraries from the Desktop and the Sidebar
A couple of the new features in Windows 7, Homegroup and Libraries, create icons on the Desktop and Sidebar, whether they are in use or not. They cannot be customized with the usual methods for adding and removing icons from the Desktop. Here at the lab, we’ve been looking for a way to get rid of these extra icons, and searched but couldn't find the answer. Finally, building on some well circulated information on removing similar invasive icons in Vista, we have a solution. The solution involves a bit of mild registry hacking, so follow the usual precautions. Specifically, export any keys that are to be modified, in case this should cause any unexpected behavior, or these features become missed at a later date.
Two keys must be removed, one each for Homegroup and Libraries. They can be found under the tree:
HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Desktop/Namespace
The key for the Libraries Icon is
{031E4825-7B94-4dc3-B131-E946B44C8DD5}
and for Homegroups it is
{B4FB3F98-C1EA-428d-A78A-D1F5659CBA93}
Once these keys have been removed, the icons will disappear from the Desktop if it is brought into focus and refreshed using the F5 key. They stick in the sidebar until the explorer shell is restarted. The simplest way to do this is to logout and log back in, however, explorer can also be killed in the task manager, and then restarted using the run dialog within same. This has the advantage of leaving all open applications running.
We use the Libraries feature on the test laptop that gives this blog it’s name, having created a Library called 'Workbench' that contains the Desktop, Downloads folder, and a folder also called Workbench that is use as just that, a place where we do a lot of work, and make a mess, especially in the process of re-encoding media files. The Homegroup feature looks like it may be useful in the future, as it implements a new simplified home networking system which is compatible only with Windows 7. At present we don’t have other machines running in the sort of capacity which would make this useful, but it appears as if it might be quite handy for setting up a set top box or other media systems.
Have fun, back up first, and make sure your cat is safe before doing this. Bear in mind, now that this hack is circulating, we can fully expect that Microsoft will change the relevant keys in an update. When that happens here, expect updated information as soon as the problem is (re)solved.
Two keys must be removed, one each for Homegroup and Libraries. They can be found under the tree:
HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Desktop/Namespace
The key for the Libraries Icon is
{031E4825-7B94-4dc3-B131-E946B44C8DD5}
and for Homegroups it is
{B4FB3F98-C1EA-428d-A78A-D1F5659CBA93}
Once these keys have been removed, the icons will disappear from the Desktop if it is brought into focus and refreshed using the F5 key. They stick in the sidebar until the explorer shell is restarted. The simplest way to do this is to logout and log back in, however, explorer can also be killed in the task manager, and then restarted using the run dialog within same. This has the advantage of leaving all open applications running.
We use the Libraries feature on the test laptop that gives this blog it’s name, having created a Library called 'Workbench' that contains the Desktop, Downloads folder, and a folder also called Workbench that is use as just that, a place where we do a lot of work, and make a mess, especially in the process of re-encoding media files. The Homegroup feature looks like it may be useful in the future, as it implements a new simplified home networking system which is compatible only with Windows 7. At present we don’t have other machines running in the sort of capacity which would make this useful, but it appears as if it might be quite handy for setting up a set top box or other media systems.
Have fun, back up first, and make sure your cat is safe before doing this. Bear in mind, now that this hack is circulating, we can fully expect that Microsoft will change the relevant keys in an update. When that happens here, expect updated information as soon as the problem is (re)solved.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Aero Peek heads up control binding.
The key binding ctrl+alt+tab is our favorite accidental discovery of late. It works much like alt+tab, except that it stays on the screen.
It's possible to actually look at the windows, move back and forth, and remove your hand from the keyboard while the windows are heads up. It can be amazingly useful when many application and windows are open on a single laptop display.
Buzz Lightyear wallpaper from Discovery Channel and NASA. Buzz just returned from the International Space Station.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
A few useful commands for Windows, restated.
It may come as a laughable surprise to those who are already familiar with these commands, but in some corners, pretty experienced workstation users haven't discovered them.
It was only after gaining some familiarity with using cygwin as a windows shell that we learned of some of these commands. Others are being restated because the make the list more useful as a quick console reference.
A quick listing of the options for most factory windows console commands is available using the command followed by /? which calls the help.
**** shutdown - works just like linux except that it doesn't. shutdown can reboot, halt, hibernate, and sleep the machine. We find this particularly useful when ssh'd into a windows machine. One oddity is that be default windows will wait about thirty seconds to execute the shutdown. the /t notation sets the timeout.
shutdown /r /p restarts the computer immediately. Otherwise /t sets the timeout. /f forces everything to close immediatlely without saving.
shutdown /a aborts a shutdown while it's on a timer, as is the default.
details at shutdown /?
**** tasklist and taskkill - our new favorite friends. It's roughly the equivalent of the ps and kill commands on linux. Tasklist lists the running processes with pids and taskkill can kill them, usually with less drama and clicking around than the explorer will allow.
taskkill /pid 0000 where the zeroes are pids garnered from tasklist to kill an errant process. try /f to add more force.
*** bcdedit is a command to to manipulate the windows bootloader. this one only works from cmd.exe, not from rxvt. So far we've used it clear out excess entry caused by abruptly deleting and reclaiming dual boot partitions. in particular, old xp installs and the remains of the chainloader left by wubi when the super easy ubuntu install is used.
I'm sure it is possible to foul up the boot process in ways that are very hard to recover from. On the other hand there might be quite a few useful possibilities other than simply deleting stale entries. It's more useful than boot.ini. boot.ini is gone now, for the rest of you out there that skipped vista entirely, like we did. bcdedit has also been used to do such things as disable driver checking in vista, and maybe 7. . . so the possibility exists that there are many useful boot time options that can be passed. Should be a useful development to see some more options come to our attention.
Having mentioned them, Wubi installs are great for creating on a clean ubuntu install for testing something, As of this writing wubi exists for xubuntu, kubuntu, and mythbuntu as well.
There will be more of these commands posted here as we find them.
It was only after gaining some familiarity with using cygwin as a windows shell that we learned of some of these commands. Others are being restated because the make the list more useful as a quick console reference.
A quick listing of the options for most factory windows console commands is available using the command followed by /? which calls the help.
**** shutdown - works just like linux except that it doesn't. shutdown can reboot, halt, hibernate, and sleep the machine. We find this particularly useful when ssh'd into a windows machine. One oddity is that be default windows will wait about thirty seconds to execute the shutdown. the /t notation sets the timeout.
shutdown /r /p restarts the computer immediately. Otherwise /t sets the timeout. /f forces everything to close immediatlely without saving.
shutdown /a aborts a shutdown while it's on a timer, as is the default.
details at shutdown /?
**** tasklist and taskkill - our new favorite friends. It's roughly the equivalent of the ps and kill commands on linux. Tasklist lists the running processes with pids and taskkill can kill them, usually with less drama and clicking around than the explorer will allow.
taskkill /pid 0000 where the zeroes are pids garnered from tasklist to kill an errant process. try /f to add more force.
*** bcdedit is a command to to manipulate the windows bootloader. this one only works from cmd.exe, not from rxvt. So far we've used it clear out excess entry caused by abruptly deleting and reclaiming dual boot partitions. in particular, old xp installs and the remains of the chainloader left by wubi when the super easy ubuntu install is used.
I'm sure it is possible to foul up the boot process in ways that are very hard to recover from. On the other hand there might be quite a few useful possibilities other than simply deleting stale entries. It's more useful than boot.ini. boot.ini is gone now, for the rest of you out there that skipped vista entirely, like we did. bcdedit has also been used to do such things as disable driver checking in vista, and maybe 7. . . so the possibility exists that there are many useful boot time options that can be passed. Should be a useful development to see some more options come to our attention.
Having mentioned them, Wubi installs are great for creating on a clean ubuntu install for testing something, As of this writing wubi exists for xubuntu, kubuntu, and mythbuntu as well.
There will be more of these commands posted here as we find them.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Power Archiver 2010 - So promising.
Maybe this is just nitpicking, but WinRAR has an archaic user interface. While there is something to be said for consistency (most WinRAR users can operate it blindly), we started looking around for something that was a little more up to date, and fit more closely in with the windows 7 style.
Searching around, Power Archiver 2010 rose to the top of the heap. It supports all the file types that WinRAR does, as far as we can tell, with similar shell integration and a user interface that has more in common with Office 2007 and later than with Word 97.
The trial being installed, it was time to leave it on the tester for a few days and see how it fared as a replacement for WinRAR, a fairly demanding task, as WinRAR is used more than once a day and has always been reliable.
The long and short of it is, while Power Archiver boasts a much nicer and more thought out user interface, in keeping with newer design ideas from Microsoft, it simply doesn't perform well on our systems. It stalls on load, hiccups frequently, and usually ends up killed rather than closing cleanly.
It's unfortunate, because with some performance and stability tuning, this could be a very nice application. Perhaps this is just growing pains related to recent changes in Windows 7, but as it's in version 11.50 now, one would think it would be quite mature in it's basic functionality. We'll keep an eye out for improvements.
Someone out there will likely point out how stupid it is to replace a perfectly working program with another one just because the new program is pretty. We expect it, and deserve it. Still, we like the shiny stuff, as long as it works as well as what it's replacing.
Searching around, Power Archiver 2010 rose to the top of the heap. It supports all the file types that WinRAR does, as far as we can tell, with similar shell integration and a user interface that has more in common with Office 2007 and later than with Word 97.
The trial being installed, it was time to leave it on the tester for a few days and see how it fared as a replacement for WinRAR, a fairly demanding task, as WinRAR is used more than once a day and has always been reliable.
The long and short of it is, while Power Archiver boasts a much nicer and more thought out user interface, in keeping with newer design ideas from Microsoft, it simply doesn't perform well on our systems. It stalls on load, hiccups frequently, and usually ends up killed rather than closing cleanly.
It's unfortunate, because with some performance and stability tuning, this could be a very nice application. Perhaps this is just growing pains related to recent changes in Windows 7, but as it's in version 11.50 now, one would think it would be quite mature in it's basic functionality. We'll keep an eye out for improvements.
Someone out there will likely point out how stupid it is to replace a perfectly working program with another one just because the new program is pretty. We expect it, and deserve it. Still, we like the shiny stuff, as long as it works as well as what it's replacing.
A windows command shell that works, or a brief guide for *NIX users.
Some in the computing world actually have more experience using linux as a desktop than they do windows. Many others are at least very comfortable using the bash shell (or others) to navigate the file system, and frequently find it faster to move around using a shell than with a bunch of clicking.
Linux is the operating system of choice for many tasks here, but we're mostly using windows on the laptops. Windows is pretty damn good. All the pointing and clicking, however, is really damn annoying to terminal dwellers. Windows is the only thing out there that doesn't come with a shell from the later parts of the 20th century. The Mac has bash and fileutils, (not to mention a wealth of open source tools available). Windows is still stuck with a command interpreter from the dark ages just before the gods delivered color monitors, among other useful features. cmd.exe still seems to be the console from the last version of DOS that outsold windows. Ick.
Powershell is something new, but we'll get there in another post.
To that end, here's what we do around here to make a windows machine more useful. There's a number of projects out there that come into play, and most of them have been around for a while and are quite mature.
The first step is to install the cygwin project on the target machine. Wander over there and grab the setup.exe. Run it with adminstrator priviledges. The cygwin installer itself is kind of cumbersome, but it gets the job done. Click through some stuff, select a mirror, and end up at the rather overwhelming listing of packages, reminding one of the package selection of Red Hat years ago. No surprise there, as this program was started somewhere in the Red Hat community years ago.
Take heart, everything that's needed to make cygwin work is automatically selected. For starters, most users will benefit from grabbing rxvt and openssh. The first delivers a traditional and largely compliant terminal emulator. It's a port of the venerable slightly improved xterm clone 'rxvt,' built to run under the native window management system. No X11 required. The second delivers ssh and sshd, allowing remote access to and from the machine. scp is in there too.
On this system rxvt-native is pinned to the start menu, and the taskbar. It works not only for the open source toolkit, but also for using basic windows commands such as ipconfig, tasklist, taskkill, and shutdown. If the windows commands are completely unfamiliar, use the /? switch to get help, similar to -h in most open source programs.
It is possible to configure some of the rxvt behavior by editing the specific command parameters in the properties dialog of the start menu icon. man rxvt for a comprehensive list of options. Of note are scrollback lines (-sl) scrollbar presence (+/-sb) and reverse video (+/-rv).
There's a decent number of command line utilities from the linux world ported to windows, both through the cygwin installer, and and as standalone binaries. We use ffmpeg to do a lot of video re-encoding, and have discovered that programs symlinked into /bin (or /usr/bin, etc.) can be called from the command line. ffmpeg and vlc go hand in hand in the encoding process this way. More on encoding with open source tools on windows will likely follow our first video post.
Another useful discovery is that from anywhere in the filesystem, calling 'explorer .' will open up the Windows Explorer in the present directory. Now if only we could figure out how to open rxvt to the current directory from a context menu in explorer. Also, calling explorer on a file from the command line will open that file with the default windows application. Nice.
As an aside, instead of deleting that cygwin setup binary from the Downloads folder when you're done with it, move it to /bin using rxvt. Run it as administrator as needed. Look for packages there before scouring the web. It is also possible to cp all of the initial .* files for bash configuration over to your windows user directory, and replace your cygwin homedir with a symlink to your windows home, so that bash opens in your /Users/.... directory.
This by no means turns a windows machine into a free software compliant machine. There are a number of projects that supply unix like functionality, including genisoimage, ffmpeg, wodim, mencoder, and others, and the mingw project offers tools to bootstrap a basic compiling environment, but mileage varies. Some projects such as ffmpeg specifically support windows, but most don't, and really don't care if it builds for you or not.
Such is life. Simply being able to mv, cp, and ls the filesystem properly is very useful.
Linux is the operating system of choice for many tasks here, but we're mostly using windows on the laptops. Windows is pretty damn good. All the pointing and clicking, however, is really damn annoying to terminal dwellers. Windows is the only thing out there that doesn't come with a shell from the later parts of the 20th century. The Mac has bash and fileutils, (not to mention a wealth of open source tools available). Windows is still stuck with a command interpreter from the dark ages just before the gods delivered color monitors, among other useful features. cmd.exe still seems to be the console from the last version of DOS that outsold windows. Ick.
Powershell is something new, but we'll get there in another post.
To that end, here's what we do around here to make a windows machine more useful. There's a number of projects out there that come into play, and most of them have been around for a while and are quite mature.
The first step is to install the cygwin project on the target machine. Wander over there and grab the setup.exe. Run it with adminstrator priviledges. The cygwin installer itself is kind of cumbersome, but it gets the job done. Click through some stuff, select a mirror, and end up at the rather overwhelming listing of packages, reminding one of the package selection of Red Hat years ago. No surprise there, as this program was started somewhere in the Red Hat community years ago.
Take heart, everything that's needed to make cygwin work is automatically selected. For starters, most users will benefit from grabbing rxvt and openssh. The first delivers a traditional and largely compliant terminal emulator. It's a port of the venerable slightly improved xterm clone 'rxvt,' built to run under the native window management system. No X11 required. The second delivers ssh and sshd, allowing remote access to and from the machine. scp is in there too.
On this system rxvt-native is pinned to the start menu, and the taskbar. It works not only for the open source toolkit, but also for using basic windows commands such as ipconfig, tasklist, taskkill, and shutdown. If the windows commands are completely unfamiliar, use the /? switch to get help, similar to -h in most open source programs.
It is possible to configure some of the rxvt behavior by editing the specific command parameters in the properties dialog of the start menu icon. man rxvt for a comprehensive list of options. Of note are scrollback lines (-sl) scrollbar presence (+/-sb) and reverse video (+/-rv).
There's a decent number of command line utilities from the linux world ported to windows, both through the cygwin installer, and and as standalone binaries. We use ffmpeg to do a lot of video re-encoding, and have discovered that programs symlinked into /bin (or /usr/bin, etc.) can be called from the command line. ffmpeg and vlc go hand in hand in the encoding process this way. More on encoding with open source tools on windows will likely follow our first video post.
Another useful discovery is that from anywhere in the filesystem, calling 'explorer .' will open up the Windows Explorer in the present directory. Now if only we could figure out how to open rxvt to the current directory from a context menu in explorer. Also, calling explorer on a file from the command line will open that file with the default windows application. Nice.
As an aside, instead of deleting that cygwin setup binary from the Downloads folder when you're done with it, move it to /bin using rxvt. Run it as administrator as needed. Look for packages there before scouring the web. It is also possible to cp all of the initial .* files for bash configuration over to your windows user directory, and replace your cygwin homedir with a symlink to your windows home, so that bash opens in your /Users/.... directory.
This by no means turns a windows machine into a free software compliant machine. There are a number of projects that supply unix like functionality, including genisoimage, ffmpeg, wodim, mencoder, and others, and the mingw project offers tools to bootstrap a basic compiling environment, but mileage varies. Some projects such as ffmpeg specifically support windows, but most don't, and really don't care if it builds for you or not.
Such is life. Simply being able to mv, cp, and ls the filesystem properly is very useful.
Using the Group Policy Editor to kill the Desktop.
This may be one of our more esoteric hacks. This author does not like Desktop icons, at all. There is so much clutter created on the screen, and a background with Window Maker and other Step-like window managers on linux has opened questions as to the generally utility of the concept. There are no Desktop icons on Window Maker or blackbox, and they were never missed here.
These icons in Windows can be disabled, using the Group Policy Editor, a rather obscure tool for disabling various features to 'lock down' Windows for kiosk uses. There's a wealth of other marginally useful features buried in there.
To access this tool, open gpedit.msc from the run dialog, or find it quickly using the start menu search functionality.
Navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Tools > Desktop.
Open the setting "Hide and Disable all items on the desktop." Switch the radio button to 'Enabled.' Yeah, that's kinda backwards to disable the Desktop. Talk to Bill.
Log out and back in, and all the Desktop icons are gone. With them goes the right click menu on the background and drag and drop functionality on the background. You've been warned.
To access the Desktop use Windows Explorer.
If one other person finds this useful, we'll be surprised.
These icons in Windows can be disabled, using the Group Policy Editor, a rather obscure tool for disabling various features to 'lock down' Windows for kiosk uses. There's a wealth of other marginally useful features buried in there.
To access this tool, open gpedit.msc from the run dialog, or find it quickly using the start menu search functionality.
Navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Tools > Desktop.
Open the setting "Hide and Disable all items on the desktop." Switch the radio button to 'Enabled.' Yeah, that's kinda backwards to disable the Desktop. Talk to Bill.
Log out and back in, and all the Desktop icons are gone. With them goes the right click menu on the background and drag and drop functionality on the background. You've been warned.
To access the Desktop use Windows Explorer.
If one other person finds this useful, we'll be surprised.
Cleaning out the context menu, finally!
Here at the lab, we’ve always hated the cluttered context menu. . . it’s always been one of those areas where windows application installers are given free reign to pollute the day to day operation of the system, through a mechanism the user is not conveniently able to access. To clean it out one has to use the registry editor. Using the registry is a pain in the ass. Nonetheless, around here we do it a lot.
We’ve been able to remove most of the garbage from the menu, but in XP, that left no convenient method to create a new folder. See, that was in the ‘new’ submenu of the right click menu. . . along with a bunch of other things. That this author has never clicked on. Ever. In 15 years or so of windows.
Now that ‘new menu’ functionality is provided in explorer windows, It can finally go. None of this is new information, but it does seem that in windows vista much of this information has been moved to a new location described below.
Without further adieu, the quick and dirty registry hack:
Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
Export this tree, for safe keeping.
Delete what you don’t want. Or delete everything. Deleting everything killed open as, which we need. Good thing there was that registry backup.
Other related locations of interest include:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ ContextMenuHandlers
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
There are an uncounted number of other 'ContextMenuHandlers' in the registry, and it's a giant pain to search for them all, but these seem to be all the one's that do anything, as of Windows 7.
The right click menu on the Desktop and in empty areas of explorer windows should be exorcized of those graphics options, file compression options, and whatever else has accumulated there. This goes a long way to extending some of the personalization enhancements in windows 7.
This post contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer. It may also hose your windows. If it doesn’t make much sense to you don’t bother with it.
We’ve been able to remove most of the garbage from the menu, but in XP, that left no convenient method to create a new folder. See, that was in the ‘new’ submenu of the right click menu. . . along with a bunch of other things. That this author has never clicked on. Ever. In 15 years or so of windows.
Now that ‘new menu’ functionality is provided in explorer windows, It can finally go. None of this is new information, but it does seem that in windows vista much of this information has been moved to a new location described below.
Without further adieu, the quick and dirty registry hack:
Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
Export this tree, for safe keeping.
Delete what you don’t want. Or delete everything. Deleting everything killed open as, which we need. Good thing there was that registry backup.
Other related locations of interest include:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ ContextMenuHandlers
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
There are an uncounted number of other 'ContextMenuHandlers' in the registry, and it's a giant pain to search for them all, but these seem to be all the one's that do anything, as of Windows 7.
The right click menu on the Desktop and in empty areas of explorer windows should be exorcized of those graphics options, file compression options, and whatever else has accumulated there. This goes a long way to extending some of the personalization enhancements in windows 7.
This post contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer. It may also hose your windows. If it doesn’t make much sense to you don’t bother with it.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Ads in Windows Media Player
A lot of superlatives have been heaped on Windows 7 since it’s first beta a year ago. For the most part we agree with them, though we’re not without complaints.
We’ve been giving windows media player a shot, a bit of microsoftware that generally avoided, because it was very cumbersome. The current version is a lot more comfortable than versions seen in the past. One complaint, though.
The Media Guide contains completely random ads that have nothing to do with music or media services being offered. While we understand the existence of ads in the Media Guide, perhaps ‘guiding’ us to media services, do users of the media guide really wish to see ads from monster and for various hygiene products within the interface. Apple’s product never does that. It just cheapens the feel of the product, making it feel like some low rent blog such as this, rather than a store operated by a premium vendor.
We’ve been giving windows media player a shot, a bit of microsoftware that generally avoided, because it was very cumbersome. The current version is a lot more comfortable than versions seen in the past. One complaint, though.
The Media Guide contains completely random ads that have nothing to do with music or media services being offered. While we understand the existence of ads in the Media Guide, perhaps ‘guiding’ us to media services, do users of the media guide really wish to see ads from monster and for various hygiene products within the interface. Apple’s product never does that. It just cheapens the feel of the product, making it feel like some low rent blog such as this, rather than a store operated by a premium vendor.
Vaio
We found a nice little utility to customize the login screen with pretty much any image we have lying around. Take a look around for the tweaks.com login changer.
All nice and activated :)
New Windows Release
Here at the labs we’ve installed the latest Windows 7 release (one that takes a bit of searching to find). It’s after a string of Win 7 RC and Beta offerings from MS that this machine has run. It’s vista performance was awful. Now that RTM is here, we thought it was time for a proper badge to replace the Vista badge this machine came with. Not much is out there so we made our own :)
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Windows Live Writer
We’re pretty happy using Windows Live Writer to post this blog, as it’s well formatted and works smoothly. Don’t laugh. It works. Perhaps we’ll test out making a movie clip in Movie Maker next.
UPDATE: My love affair with windows live writer ended in about two days, when i realized it was basically trashing the posts with a bunch of busted html code. It’s what i should have expected.
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