Venu Anuganti Blog

Well, thats not my word, its from TechDirt. After the much talk spread about the same on the internet, I too tried on my XP box, and after playing a while decided not to keep the Google’s VPN any more as the question that raised in my mind several times is ..”Why do I need this ? Why do I need to secure when I use my system only for browsing ? “.

Anyway, read the TechDirt discussion for more info on what others are telling about the same.

Today, Firefox 1.0.7 is released with the security and stability updates that were floating around the web. Here is the fixes from the release announcement:

Download link: Firefox 1.0.7

If you want to install Vista as a guest Operating System on your existing OS, you can use any of the following technologies:

• Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (Workstation)
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (Server OS)
• VMWare (Workstation or server based on VMWare workstation or server product)
  

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004:

You can find a nice posting from Anand Iyer a developer of Microsoft on how to install Vista on Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005:

I tried to install Vista BETA1 on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 standard edition, but could not able to do that instead I broke my 2003 server host.

Here is the steps that I did to install Vista on Virtual Server 2005:

• Downloaded the Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition from MSDN (subscribed one)
• Installed it on my Windows 2003 Server SP1 (Dell Prec 470 - Dual Xeon with HT (acts as 4 CPU), 80GB, 1GB SDRAM, 128 ATI FireGL 3100)
• Created a Virtual Machine of size 20GB with 256 RAM
• Configured the Vista Virual Machine CD-DVD Drive to use the Vista ISO image. You need to copy the ISO image co-located to Virtual additions ISO
• Configured the Virtual Server 2005 RMVC on port 1025
• Started the Vista Virtual machine
• Connected to this Virtual machine using the VMRC client using the connecting string as http://localhost:1025/ and immediately I can see the BIOS and VISTA installer loading
• Once the installer blue screen is running, pressed ‘Shift+F10″ and got the command prompt
• Now using diskpart created a primary NTFS partition on the whole 20GB virtual disk
• After the partition is done, restarted the Virtual machine by resetting it and turning it off
• After the restart, I can see the installer screen back..good so far
• But now when I click on “Install Now” button, it rebounces to the same screen again and again
• So, tried to use ISO mount (using Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel to a drive Z: ) and pointed RMVC client to use that physical drive; but still no luck. Same problem, the installer screen reappears back to install now dialog every time you click on Install Vista button.
• So, gave up on installing Vista on Virtual Server 2005.
  

Now, I decided to get rid of Virtual Server completely on my system as its not working to install Vista, and uninstalled the same. Even though it did not ask me to reboot, I did to have my clean system back. But it is not booting any more. Even though the boot image loads after that instead of loading the OS, the system recycles back to bios and the process continues like that for ever.

Now booted with 2003 installer CD, and I can see that the disk is now labelled with unpartioned…hmmmm. My guess is, the partition creation that I did within virtual machine might have caused this problem. Must be a bug from Virtual Server when using Vista. Anyway, with this I needed to reinstall the OS as there is no other option left nor I can fix it as the 2003 CD installer also could not identify any existing OS on that disk. I am still trying to get this 2003 server up2date.

VMWare:

I did not tried on VMWare, but if you want to try by yourself, you can use this post as a starting point.

[Submitted by Ajay Pandey]

Larry Osterman posted in his blog what changes were made to the audio for Vista. Here is the few list of improvements:

• Entire audio stack has been moved from kernel into the user mode, to reduce the amount of code that runs in the kernel
• Changes to the infrastructure to support pro-audio apps, to have better audio quality (Larry will update us on this very soon, stay tuned to his blog)
• Totally revamped UI for audio, Sndvol32 and mmsys.cpl were completely rewritten to include new, higher quality visuals, and to focus on the common tasks that users actually need to do. (we have to wait till BETA2 to see the new UI)
  

In a side note, I found an issue (not really as this is BETA ) while playing songs with the Real Player on Vista. The player picks the default volumn when the track changes or when the next song is played even when you adjust the volumn in the middle of the song. It seems it picks the volumn level when it loads. But you dont see that in XP or 2003. You can observe the bahaviour from this low quality AVI video file.

You can find a brief note about Internet Exploter 7 security in the IE Blog, posted by Dean. Nice to read what steps they were taken to strengthen the security of IE 7.

On the other side, check the following news item if you believe Firefox is more secure than IE:

• Symantec: Mozilla browsers more vulnerable than IE
• Is the Firefox honeymoon over?

Yet another Yahoo! product which is not fully compatible on Vista after Yahoo! mail and Yahoo! Music Engine, which is nothing but the worlds popular Yahoo! messenger itself. Yahoo! messenger is not fully working on Vista Beta1.

Even though I installed Yahoo! messenger version 7,0,0,426 few days back when I tested Yahoo! music engine on Vista, today I thought of using it on Vista when my XP is used to create a DVD.

I started Messenger and signed in; after signin, I get a blank screen as in this screen shot. That means I could not identify the list of friends who are online now. The messenger allows me to perform all operations to browse and check stock quotes, news and other things.

The messenger also hungs during the signout or trying to play a song from Yahoo! music Launcast and I needed to kill it (YPager.exe) from the Task manager. Atleast now, Yahoo! should seriously consider the compatibility of its products under Vista, else it might loose the base to Google or MSN, whos products does seem to work fine on Vista.

Preston Gralla, a freelance journalist wrote in one of his recent post in O’Reilly Weblogs that the IE7 has more chances to kill Firefox.

With the new beta release of Developer Toolbar and tight security from Vista; there are more chances for Firefox users to switch back to IE in the coming days who use Firefox as an alternative for IE due to the lack of security, tabbed browsing, extensions (IE extensions) and themes that Firefox allows. As IE 7 does support all of these, so there is no question about IE getting much more popular than any other browser in the coming days as IE is integrated with Windows OS.

The author claims, the IE7 beta revealed at the Professional Developers Conference have enough new features that it may stop people from flocking to Firefox. A new Quick Tabs feature, for example, will let you better manage tabs, and gives you a thumbnail view of all of your tabs — something that Firefox doesn’t do. Page Zoom will let you zoom in on text and graphics on Web pages.

Fore more information, check the complete article from onlamp.com.