Last week, Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released. Being a fearless cutting-edge Kubuntu kind of guy, I opted for an upgrade at the earliest possible. So later that Thursday night I set the distribution upgrade going in my rock-stable Kubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Viñales^WMeerkat” AMD64 install’s package manager and went to bed. The servers were clearly being hammered and the ETA of the files required was some 22 hours hence. I got up the next morning to find that the upgrade had halted as some files were not retrievable. I set it going again and this time it didn’t quite take as long, proceeded without a hitch and later that day I was booting into a shiny new operating system.

Five minutes later and I was still booting into a shiny new operating system.

And then I was on the desktop. The long boot was almost certainly a first-boot cleaning up and getting everything ship-shaped deal, I figured. So I did it again, and LO! It was just as slow. Network transfer speeds across the wlan were horrible, there were 30 second pauses in dmesg waiting for some error to be thrown up by my SATA DVD drive, and right at the end of the logs was some sort of problem with IRQs for the onboard audio.

SATA DVD dmesg weirdness

[2.065528] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xfe02f000 port 0xfe02f180 irq 22 [2.610044] ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [2.611679] ata4.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223C, SB05, max MWDMA2 [3.413170] ata4.00: configured for PIO4 [35.000034] ata4.00: exception Emask 0×0 SAct 0×0 SErr 0×0 action 0×6 frozen [35.000038] ata4.00: failed command: IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE [35.000043] ata4.00: cmd a1/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 tag 0 pio 512 in [35.000046] ata4.00: status: { DRDY } [35.000051] ata4: hard resetting link [35.550037] ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [36.352253] ata4.00: configured for PIO4 [37.152989] ata4: EH complete

hda-intel audio IRQ weirdness

[119.307732] hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #1. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj.

I headed over to the Kubuntu forums and posted a couple of new topics in the appropriate Natty Post Install section with logs etc and asked for help. I love the internet and forums are a pretty special place. The immediate response is usually not the one you were hoping for. I opted for a clean install to remove the upgrade from the list of suspects.

180gigs of ~ rsync later and I was ready to boot off the install CD. I didn’t want to completely wipe the hard disk as I have specific needs. I use the last 10gig of that disk to hold my Windows pagefile, and the last 10gigs of my Windows disk to hold my Linux swap. I also keep an emergency 10gig partition for swap on the Linux disk in case I ever need to pull the Windows one.

Thankfully, KDE now comes with a rather snappy partition manager. I was able to boot off the install CD, go into a live session, clean out the existing Kubuntu partition and then fire up the actual install process and tell it to use it. This went swimmingly well, although I do recommend that you should only instruct the install to get downloads during if you are remarkably patient. It goes and gets all the language files you specifically didn’t get the install DVD to avoid.

At the end of the install it just hung there, waiting to finish. It was something like 90% done, which according to progress bars could mean anything from just started to almost done.

One of the great things about running a live session and installing from it is that underneath the installation procedure you have a fully working operating system, so I was able to open a terminal and see what was going on. Three processes (kwin, knotify and kded4) were each using 100% of their respective cores. I decided now would be a good time to read a book rather than be tempted to try and fix it. Some time later the progress bar went from 90% to done and I was instructed to reboot into my new OS.

Except that for some reason grub had decided to ignore the fact that the UUID had changed with a new partition having been created and I was dumped unceremoniously into a grub recovery prompt. So back into the live CD I go, mount the drive, install grub to it (again) and reboot. This time it worked.

And five minutes later I am on the desktop, with the same problems I was seeing after the upgrade install. So, kudos on a fantastic upgrade script, epic fail on the actual quality of the install.

Luckily, by now some people who really know what they are doing have answered my forum threads, and these are the things I did to fix my problems:

SATA DVD Weirdness

In the file /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules, comment out the line directly under:

# ATA/ATAPI devices (SPC-3 or later) using the “scsi” subsystem

Then run (as root): update-initramfs -u

Be warned though: this is not a static fix. A later upgrade could overwrite that file and you will have to redo this hack.

hda-intel audio IRQ weirdness

In the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf add the following line:

options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1

But yes, I still have two IRQs assigned to that device, and one of them apparently still causes the same message to appear at the end of dmesg. Also, call me superstitious but if I make any changes to anything under modprobe.d I immediately update initramfs.

Slow wlan transfer speeds

Create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/ath9.conf and in this file write the following:

options ath9k nohwcrypt=1

That fixed that problem.

Other things to consider

If you have an nvidia graphics card, you probably don’t want to use the nouveau drivers, but rather prefer the official binary package from nvidia. Unless you hate 3d and a pretty desktop. So install the proper drivers from ‘additional drivers’ and set about removing nouveau as it’s only going to cause you grief later, probably.

Create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-local.conf and add the following line:

blacklist nouveau

I also created one to remove ipheth from loading iPhone network tethering as I will set that up if I need it:

blacklist ipheth

update your initramfs again and reboot, again.

You’re now running proper drivers with real opengl. Win.

However, if you make any changes in the nvidia control panel, excepting the ones that you can tell it to write into your xorg.conf, it will lose them as, and correct me if this isn’t completely insane behaviour that ought to have been fixed about a million years ago, Kubuntu does not know how to load the settings unless you tell it. To do that you go into your system settings, find the startup programs thingy and create your own entry with ‘nvidia-settings -l’. Except that this will break if you don’t deselect ‘Include X Display Names in the Config File’ first and you will end up with the same old default settings.

Issues I still have yet to fix

I’m seeing awful tearing in VLC video playback that wasn’t happening in 10.10 with the same settings.

More as I find them, almost certainly.

Conclusion

However much closer Ubuntu 10.10 was to the holy grail, the consumer desktop, I must say that my experiences thus far with 11.04 suggest that one small step for a penguin has been a massive leap back for penguinkind.

There was some recent discussion on this site about Linux and whether it was a consumer-ready operating system or not, and having installed Kubuntu on my PC alongside Windows7 recently I now feel much better qualified to comment.

Installing Kubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) is a breeze. I mean, really simple. All you have to do is download the ISO, get the little application to make it install from memory stick, configure your BIOS to boot from memory stick and reboot. Then it asks you a few simple questions, sets your timezone for you if you’re net-connected, gives you some hard-disk options like “use all of this one” or somesuch, and then it chugs away happily for really not very long at all. To anyone used to installing Windows, this thing is a lot faster than the usual 45 minutes.

Then it says “OK, I’m done now – pull out your install media and hit enter” and reboots the machine when you comply. Then it loads up GRUB and from there the default Kubuntu option.

Job done, it really is that simple.

Unplug your LAN and look to your wifi, and LO! You are not able to connect to your router if you have any wireless NIC using the popular Ralink RT2860 chipset because it does not support WPA2 out of the box. This is a driver issue. No big deal, right? You just go to the Ralink website (back on wires) and get yourself some fresh Linux drivers and install them … except not. No, what you get is source. You have to edit a couple of files and compile them yourself, then work some command line magic to unload the old drivers and load the new. To do this you just apt-got build-essentials which is GCC, a bunch of Linux headers and whatever else the average joe will need to be able to compile stuff.

This is ok, not too much trouble for a geek. Especially given a nice walkthrough after a short google. I’m not scared of the command line, and I know a bit about using bash. Edit a couple of files because WPA2 is disabled by default here too, run make as root, etc etc.

Then you notice that if you have an nvidia graphics card, Kubuntu has gone straight for the Nouveau open-source driver, which is great so long as all you want is 2d graphics. But really, if it’s not prettier than Windows why would you bother with KDE? I love kmail, but I’ve done without it for years.

Installing the proper binary nvidia drivers is somewhat less simple than compiling your own wifi drivers. It requires that you unload and then seek-and-destroy every mention of Nouveau, adding it to a soon-to-be-depracated (according to a warning that pops up on the command line from time to time) blacklist file, hopping into and back out of single-user root mode from the recovery options in GRUB before installing the drivers from the command line. Thankfully it configures X for you.

I wasn’t giving this my full attention, so it did take me a few weeks to finally nail down getting Kubuntu installed with working wireless and nvidia drivers, but I was still getting this weird thing happen every time I started up Kubuntu: the system would boot, everything would load up and then a few seconds later the screen would go all single colour and the computer was completely unresponsive. I SSHed in from another machine and had a look at what was going on, and Xorg was running 100% CPU. Why? I still have no idea. I found the simple fix was to disable ACPI on the startup command in GRUB.

What this means is that my computer now runs a Linux desktop that can’t turn itself off without help.

So it’s taken a bit of work, a bit of searching internets for answers, compiling my own drivers … and it’s been a lot of fun getting here and getting it working. There is a sense of achievement involved in the journey taken to get me here, writing this article in the same OpenOffice I run in Windows. But this is not what you would call the consumer operating system experience. This is pure hobbyist stuff, plain and simple. This is what makes Linux great for people like me, and if you’re reading this probably people like you. Although I bet most of you, if you love UNIX on your desktop, are using OSX instead because stuff just works and you hate having to faff about with drivers ever.

But if you are a Linux advocate who says it’s ready for the masses, ask your grandma what chipset her wireless NIC has.

Kubuntu is very nice. It’s pretty simple to install and I bet it works just great on a netbook or something so long as what little hardware it has is properly supported. But the second you run into any kind of problem you are in the shell if you’re lucky, or fighting a losing battle with dependencies if you’re not.

It’s just not ready to compete with Windows or OSX on a consumer level yet, and I rather suspect that as long as X lives and breathes it never will be. No consumer is ever going to want to have to know what sits between the desktop they can see and the drivers or kernel they can’t. Most people never want to have to hear about windowing systems or compilers. These are the kind of people who refer to their computer box as their hard disk, and will tell you that they write their letters in Microsoft. The best advice you can give someone like that is to go buy themselves an iMac.

This week, Apple had one of their famous announcements. As usual it was on at an unfriendly time of day for me, since I live in the UTC+0700 timezone (meaning it started at midnight on the Thursday/Friday) – but I still stayed awake to watch it. I am a registered iPhone developer and I myself have an iPhone 3G, so I am interested in Apple’s announcements generally, and in particular I am interested in the iPhone OS announcements.

So we have all seen the stuff that was publicly announced, and that is all I am using as source material for this post – as well as some of the online ‘gossip’ sites. I am not breaking any NDAs or talking about anything that is specifically marked as “Apple Confidential” on the iPhone Developers section of the Apple Developers site.

After the event, I have been listening to people complaining about a few items. Specifically, the biggest complaints have been:

1. The new section in the developers’ agreement about only allowing code written in C/C++/ObjectiveC and Javascript to be interpreted by Safari in a web application.
2. The new version of iPhone OS will only support iPhone 3G and 3GS in “summer” and the iPad in “fall”.
3. The headline feature (multitasking) only works on the iPhone 3GS.

I will address these in order.

Allowed Languages

So according to many online sources, Apple are only allowing applications that make direct use of the Cocoa API, or web applications that run under Safari.

Specifically, iPhone native (as opposed to web-based) applications must be written to use the Cocoa API directly, and must be written in C, C++ or ObjectiveC using the libraries supplied by Apple without any other code in between the application and the Cocoa libraries. I got this piece of information from Daring Fireball (a good source of reliable information) rather from any of the less reliable blogs, or from anything covered by Apple’s NDA.

The Daring Fireball post linked to above mentions that this pretty much puts the kibosh on Adobe’s upcoming Flash CS5 software, one of whose headline features is the ability to write an application in Flash, and then through a set of compatibility libraries allow the application to be built into a native Cocoa application. Daring Fireball also mentions the MonoTouch project, that uses a similar method to allow a developer to write an application in .NET and then build an iPhone application out of the resulting code.

I would be more broad about this though, and say that Apple are not simply trying to poke Adobe in the eye and say “we told you already – no Flash on the iPhone”; it is my opinion that they wish to keep the standard of software that runs on the iPhone at its highest possible level.

If someone writes a set of libraries that allow you to put programs together that are written in a non-iPhone native language, and then acts as a translator between that code and Cocoa, then how do you think its performance will be compared to an application that was written in C/C++/ObjC that uses Cocoa directly? On a scale of Slower/Similar/Faster, you just know it’s not going to be “Faster”. If the developer is really lucky, it might approach the performance of a native app, but since it has a translation layer in between, you can’t fancy its chances. The answer has to be “Slower”.

And the overall performance is also affected by the mere presence of a translation layer, which must occupy extra space in memory. Given that this version of the OS is focusing on multitasking, prohibiting the use of applications written to use intermediate translation libraries makes good technical sense right now.

Devices Supported At All by iPhone OS v4

This one is what actually prompted me to write this post.

The question was: why are Apple only supporting the 3G and 3GS, and not supporting the first generation iPhone?

The cynical answer is that Apple are in the business of selling hardware, and they want people to buy the latest phone. However, if you look a little closer, you will see that Apple have committed to releasing versions of OS4 for the 3G, 3GS and the two later models of iPod Touch. These are all the versions of hardware that Apple currently sell, so this makes good sense for them.

That’s already four versions of the operating system they need to create, test and support.

They say the schedule for this is “summer”, which I am assuming means Q3. (Please note that in the Southern hemisphere, summer is actually December until about March. And where I live, it’s the height of summer right now, which is replaced by the rainy season next month.)

But the rumour mills have also been churning, about the successor to the 3GS. This is apparently due to come out around the end of June, with the corresponding update to the iPod Touch around September.

So really, that is six separate versions of OS 4 that Apple will already need to support when it first comes out, with the iPad version coming out by the end of the year. They do not need another two versions for the original first generation iPhone and iPod Touch.

There is precedent for this in the mobile market, too – if you buy a Windows Mobile phone and a new version of the OS comes out soon after, you may be able to get an update for your phone. However, if the phone is more than six months old, chances are you’re out of luck.

Well, the iPhone 3G is nearly two years old, and can run the new OS. The first generation iPhone is almost three years old and cannot. I actually think that is fair.

Multitasking not supported on the 3G and its equivalent iPod Touch

This one was painful for me to hear, as I own an iPhone 3G.

The ‘S’ of 3GS apparently stood for ‘speed’. This was achieved by increasing CPU and doubling RAM. The CPU is of course important when running many tasks, but in particular increasing the RAM makes an enormous difference.

If the RAM in the iPhone 3G must hold the system as well as all running tasks – doubling the amount of RAM means a massive increase in the amount of memory available for holding applications and their data (way more than just double, since the system takes a significant portion of the available memory on an iPhone 3G). This is the main reason why the 3GS feels so much faster than the 3G.

So trying to run multiple tasks, even using the multitasking techniques in OS4 that are optimised to reduce RAM usage, on an iPhone 3G would simply not work.

So grudgingly, I have to accept that my iPhone will not support multitasking.

And of course, when the next version of iPhone comes out, that is one more reason to want to upgrade.

Conclusion

Apple no longer provide OS updates for the three-year old iPhone and iPod Touch, but they do for the two-year old versions. I think this is fair (and sorry Spadge – I know you wanted to upgrade when it came out!).

Multitasking only works on iPhones and iPod Touch models less than two years old, which for technical reasons I (grudgingly) think is also fair.

And was it worth staying up until 01:30 to follow the presentation, when I had work the following morning?

As an iPhone developer, I was hoping that there would be a beta of the new operating system to download, as well as one of the development environment – which there was. So I was able to start those downloading before finally calling it a night.

Definitely worth staying up for.

Linux has been with us in one form or another for a very long time now. The first ‘real’ distribution of Linux was released over 16 years ago – in dog years that’s 112, and in computer years that’s like … forever.

The first version of Linux that I remember was Yggdrasil, which was released (according to wikipedia) in December 1992. However, the first one that was really usable was Slackware, released in 1993 (again, according to teh ‘Pedia).

Back then, the whole Linux thing was purely for techies.

I was a young programmer who was caught in the horrors of coding for DOS 3.3x and Windows 2, when a friend at work showed me this new operating system that was available for the Atari ST. As someone who was both an Atari ST owner and a total nerd, I thought this MINIX thing sounded fantastic, and got a copy from my friend. Making it boot from my ridiculously-expensive 20MB hard disk, rather than booting from floppy and then mounting the hard disk, took me weeks – but once it was done I could settle down and look at how to write device drivers, and how to use Unix-like system calls. There was no internet available to mortals back then, and the ‘man’ system had not yet arrived in Minix-land.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I was a young programmer caught in the horrors of coding for DOS 3.3x and Windows 3.1, as well as venturing forth into the exciting new world of Windows NT. My friend showed me Yggdrasil Linux running on a PC. This had advantages, in that PCs were by then cheap enough to build from parts, and those parts had become inexpensive enough that you could put a system together for relatively little money.

So I built my first Linux machine.

By now, we are in 1994, and I was using a 486/66 with 4MB RAM and a 160MB hard disk.

I was a programmer of seven years’ experience then, and had practically taught myself everything I knew. I was fascinated by operating systems, and what made them work. I was enthralled by this new Linux stuff, and subscribed to the Walnut Creek CDROM monthly distributions (by snailmail!).

So Linux was available and usable by tech-nutcases in 1994. Since then, distributions have come and gone – new ones have popped up and old ones have fallen by the wayside – some of the newer ones similarly have disappeared.

The World of Microsoft

“One Microsoft Way. It’s not just a creed, it’s their actual address.”

In the year 1995, Microsoft released their first “consumer-based” 32-bit operating system, actually a horribly bastardised amalgamation of a 32-bit presentation layer built on layers of new-fangled 32-bit goodness based on Windows NT’s Win32 subsystem, and a crufty 16-bit core. They called it Windows 95 and it largely sucked.

We knew it sucked, and they knew it sucked. But they marketed it well, and it was still WAY better than 16-bit Windows, and so it took off. A few years later they released Windows 98, which was much better, but still had some 16-bit skeletons in the closet.

In parallel, Microsoft’s “professional” operating system was Windows NT, which in 1996 was up to version 4 (they “cheated” by releasing the first version as “3.1″). However, NT4 was a hungry beast. It ran best on the fastest, most expensive CPUs, and its RAM requirements were … excessive in the day.

Microsoft had been working to make Windows NT acceptable to the consumer, and this was largely focused around the resource requirements, as well as its rather dismal graphics performance. My memory tells me that the plans were for them to release NT version 5 to the consumer market at the same time as to businesses – but in the end, the graphics (in particular the DirectX layer) were not ready. So they released Windows 2000 (NT v5.0) to businesses only at the end of 1999, and released NT (v5.1) with DirectX and a new front-end shell, as Windows XP in October 2001.

Windows XP is probably the most popular operating system of all time, and I would hazard a guess that every single person in the developed world has used it.

Since then we had the unmitigated disaster that was Windows Vista (NT v6.0), and Microsoft returned to sanity again when they released Windows 7 (NT v6.1 … WTF?) in October 2009.

Windows 7 is a Good OS, and has many vast improvements over previous versions. It has come a long long way since Windows 3.1 and the first version of Windows NT that was around in 1993.

From Apple’s Point of View

If we backtrack again to 1994, while I was playing around with Linux in my spare time, and programming for Windows 3.1 and Windows NT … those clever people at Apple were releasing the PowerPC version of their own operating system (MacOS as it is called now, but then it was System 7).

Apple were in the midst of switching the hardware on their desktop computers away from the Motorola 680×0 range of CPUs to the IBM/Motorola PowerPC (a 32-bit RISC CPU). For the most part, the average consumer did not notice, apart from having to upgrade some of their software to a version that would run on the new OS.

Things progressed nicely, and after the total mess that was Copland, and then the rumours that they were going to buy Be (with its innovative BeOS), they announced in 1997 that they had bought Steve Jobs’ company NeXT and that the next big release of their OS would be based on NeXTSTEP, which in turn is a Mach-based kernel with a Unix-like (FreeBSD) core above it – and a friendly UI at the top, which for the most part is all the consumer ever sees.

Since then, MacOS X (as the new system was called) has gone through a public beta, and seven major releases, 10.0 to 10.6. The hardware platform was changed again to run on Intel-based hardware, and anyone who buys a Macintosh computer these days has the option of running both MacOS X or Windows (XP, Vista or Windows 7).

I contend that MacOS X is the most advanced consumer OS out there (especially with the new OpenCL stuff and the amazing Grand Central Dispatch, both included in v10.6 of the operating system. As a programmer, I get excited just by reading about GCD and how simple it is to use).

MacOS along with its sister that runs on the iPod Touch, the iPhone and now the iPad (which is basically a cut-down version of OSX), Apple’s operating system has come a long way from the co-operative multitasking and limited RAM of system 7 back in the early 90s.

And … back to Linux

So, Windows and MacOS are the two real ‘mainstream’ consumer operating systems, and both have been around for a very long time. The original Macintosh was introduced at the beginning of 1984 and its OS has been growing since. The first version of Windows (actually v1.01) was released at the end of 1985, and it has improved dramatically (albeit with some hiccups along the way – Windows ME or Vista, anyone?) since.

Linux has been around for a very long time, too. Since its inception in 1991, it has turned into a mainstream server OS, with most of the internet relying on Linux or FreeBSD. Several home appliances have a Linux kernel in them (TiVo runs on a Linux core, as do several home WiFi routers), and some netbooks have limited RAM, a tiny hard disk (or SSD) and run a Linux kernel with a custom UI on top of it.

But lets be honest, have you ever tried to set up a Linux machine? Have you?

Even the most modern Linux distribution that are aimed squarely at consumers, become a command-line and config-file nightmare if you want to do something esoteric like plug a WiFi dongle into your machine.

Macintosh has pretty much been plug-and-play for ever, and Windows 95 was heralded as Microsoft’s first foray into the world of plug-and-play (although I contend that they got it right with Windows 2000). But those operating systems are at least fifteen years old. Where’s Linux’s plug-and-play?

If you change the video card on your Linux box, you are pretty much going to have to delve in yourself to make it work – assuming you can get drivers for it.

Yes, the Apple Mac is a more closed platform, and only certain hardware will work for it – but when it does work, you really do just plug it in and then use it.

Windows is not quite as simple, since the range of supported hardware is vastly greater (i.e. pretty much everything) – but being the most popular consumer OS out there by far, as a result you can download a driver, plug your hardware in, and it works.

But with Linux, even if the hardware is supported, and there are drivers that work, you can quickly find yourself in dependency hell if the drivers were compiled for a different version of the C runtime (or gettext or similar) that you happen to have on your machine.

Linux has come a long long way since its inception, but right now it is most useful as a server OS, where the people who use it (and have to maintain it) are basically IT professionals, or computer enthusiasts.

Linux for Consumers

Do you know anyone (yourself included) who uses Linux as their main desktop operating system? Chances are you know a few.

Do you know anyone (yourself included) who uses Linux as their main desktop operating system who either does not have a degree in something to do with computers (programming, computer science, or similar) or does not work as a professional programmer (or IT support person or similar)? I am guessing … not.

Do you know anyone (yourself included) who uses Linux as their main desktop operating system, who would recommend to a member of their own family that they should also use Linux as their main operating system? Never in a month of Sundays – because they know that they will have to try supporting it over the phone, and eventually after trying to explain what “vi” is, have to drive over with their own laptop and spend an afternoon undoing something someone did (which will always be “nothing” when asked) to something somewhere that stopped it being able to connect to the internet.

Despite what most programmers think, the real test of whether a system (any system – be it an OS or a simple program) is really ready for use is not whether they can install and use it every day themselves, but whether or not they would be prepared to give it to a family member to use every day.

In over 16 years, both Windows and MacOS have gone through many generations and have both gone through at least one total rewrite from the ground up. Linux on the other hand, has steadily progressed with thousands of enthusiastic developers – and in my opinion is still nowhere near ready for use as a mainstream consumer OS.

My Windows 7 experience probably reads a lot like a lot of other people’s experiences. I put the RC1 onto my wife’s PC as soon as it came out, as she was running VISTA at the time (I blame Spore). I then dallied with a dual boot system on my own machine as XP SP3 was running my racing simulators just fine and I didn’t need to splash out on a memory upgrade to make my machine games worthy in W7. Once I’d got the extra memory though there was no real reason to keep XP around longer than it took me to find a cross disk migrate tool so I could move my PATA installed W7 onto my SATA drive, for which I thank Acronis who sell an awesome bunch of tools to handle exactly this sort of thing.

So about a week ago I get a MASSIVE panic on when I see a message pop up telling me that my RC1 install will roll over and stick its legs in the air (and not in a good way) at the end of Feb. Now, I’ve been running this install as my main desktop for 9 months, as my wife has on hers. So in very little time I have to install two Windows 7s without losing any program data, settings, game saves and all the other gumph you accumulate on your desktop machine. I really really don’t want to do a fresh install, and my wife tells me that if I mess with her Sims3 neighbourhoods she will have parts of my person as adornment, if you know what I’m saying.

So two upgrade installs are in order.

And this is where the path gets a little twisty. You cannot upgrade RC1 into a release W7. You cannot upgrade an Ultimate install into anything other than an Ultimate. 32Bit only goes to 32bit. Antitrust N releases can only upgrade other antitrust N releases. So basically you can only use the upgrade install function if you are upgrading what you have to the exact same thing. I understand it deigns to allow you to upgrade VISTA to W7, so long as all the above criteria are met; i.e. 32bit to 32bit, ultimate to ultimate, etc.

RC1 is Ultimate. I don’t have more than 3gig RAM and do like a bit of hardware driver support, so my install is RC1 32bit. So I need to find me a release to market Windows 7 Ultimate 32Bit (non antitrust N) to install and then I have 30 days to work out how I’m going to pay for them (MS are kind enough to allow you a 30 days grace trial period before activation), or get me a cheaper version and hose everything.

Hang on, I hear you think – didn’t this guy just say you can’t do an upgrade of RC1 anyway? Well, gentle reader, just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean it can’t be done. There’s two files on an install ISO that you can edit to enable you to 1) install a different level of install, and 2) specify the minimum upgrade version.

In \Sources\ there is a file called EI.CFG that tells the installer what version it installs. So delete that and it will allow you to choose Basic, Expert, Advanced, Home, Professional, Ultimate, Whatever, Etc. So long as you have the correct valid key for the version you are installing, it’s all good, right?

Also in \Sources\ there is a file called CVERSION.INI and this is the baby you want to edit to enable upgrading your RC1. Change MinClient=whatever to MinClient=7000 and you’re good to go.

Seriously, that’s all it takes. Delete one file, edit another. Save the ISO, burn it to a DVD, run setup.exe and jump through the whiney driver hoops.

Now, that said, who wants to buy me a couple of W7 Ultimate installs?