Windows recovery console - it works!

Today I have successfully used the Windows recovery console from the Windows XP install CD for the first time in my life. Until now I thought it was just a cruel joke on all sysadmins by evil Microsoft programmers. The list of available commands hardly fills a single screen so there isn't much one can do which can be very frustrating for a long term Linux user.

I was installing some drivers and got a BSOD during the process. After a restart the system was unbootable, not even in safe mode, complaining about a corrupted driver file in system32/drivers. Naturally I tried the "last working" configuration from the boot menu. Unfortunately that didn't help either.

So using the recovery console I was able to copy the correct file from lastgood/system32/drivers to the system32/drivers which fixed the system. In other words the "last working" configuration contained the right files. Unfortunately this obviously isn't enough and some more secret magic is required.

So if the "last working" configuration feature was working I wouldn't have to use the crappy console in the first place. It scares me that most people on this planet use a system that
1) can break during installation of hardware drivers and result in an unbootable state
2) has totally useless restore capabilities
3) and an even more useless recovery console!

And the fact that I got paid for repairing the computer didn't make me much happier (just a little bit).

MuseumsQuartier

Last week I went to MuseumsQuartier in Vienna to shoot a new panorama. It didn't turn out as good as I expected. I arrived to late and the sun was already too low. And it would have been much nicer if the trees were green. Well I guess I'll have to wait till spring!

Is GNOME really better?

I've always been KDE user. I love kwin, kicker, kate and all the other power features and utils that come with it. In my eyes Konqueror is the best file manager ever. I've been using Kubuntu for the last 3 years but I'm starting to wonder whether I should switch to something else.

I've been working with GNOME quiet often recently, especially on Ubuntu. And it's pretty good. I actually works where KDE fail terribly. For example file associations - which file types are opened by which programs. They are a horror in KDE. Sometimes I have the feeling that if I double click a file in the Konqueror it will be opened with a program chosen by a random generator. Some video files are opened by Kaffeine, some by MPlayer and some don't work at all (like flv videos) although they could be opened by MPlayer or Xine. So every time a install a new system or create a new user I have to fix the settings because the defaults just don't work! And if you're using Firefox (because Konqueror sucks as a browser) then you should prepare for even more trouble because it's file associations are completely different from KDE's.

Is it really so difficult to get these simple things right? You can't expect an normal user to work with a system with such fundamental problems.

And there are many more use cases where Ubuntu is clearly superior to Kubuntu which I'm planning to cover in the future.

I really hope that KDE4 will get this fixed.