Honeymonster's Lair

Windows 7 was released as a public download on Monday. I downloaded yesterday, and am now testing on my tower system. A clean installation was a breeze and had finished within 30 to 45 minutes. This is much faster than a standard clean install of Vista.

The user interface of Win7 hasn’t had much tweaking since Vista, with the main new feature being the updated taskbar. I can’t decide whether this lack of UI change is indicative of how the final product will look, or whether Microsoft are keeping the new design under their hats for a big flourish at launch time.

Rumours have surfaced about the launch date for the final product. These have indicated an “October” launch, with the writers of various articles about the leak stating that this is October 2010. However, the RC expires in June 2010, and previous history has shown that the final pre-release of Microsoft’s products have had expiry dates up to 6 months beyond the projected/final launch dates. One such example of this is my copy of Windows 98 Beta expiring somewhat after the final release had come and gone. (I forget the actual figure, but I do remember getting around the expiration by resetting my system clock before booting: I was a real rebel back then! :-p)

I’m now also trying an upgrade install using my laptop to see whether there are any major problems on that front. I really should try both a clean install and upgrade install on the two architectures (x86 and x86_64) rather than just a clean on x86_64 and just an upgrade on x86.

The upgrade process on my laptop identified only two issues prior to beginning. Those being the presence on the ATI drivers along with McAfee Internet Security. Neither of these two products are compatible with Win7 at the versions I had installed.

I’ve not decided upon which Internet Security suite I want to settle with, as I have had issues with Norton complaining once I’d installed more times than they allow (even though the installs were all on the same machine) and technical difficulty when downloading McAfee approximately one year ago.

On a technical note, however, I have found Norton to either not prompt enough, or in the right circumstances, or prompt too much. McAfee was the first ever anti-viral product I had ever used, way back in the days of DOS; ever since I’ve always found the product to work well, with my only bad experience being with the third party that McAfee had used for the download store. I guess I can’t really blame McAfee for this third party’s shortcomings.

Aptana Studio is a pretty darned impressive IDE for web-related development. I use it almost exclusively. The installation instructions on the download page make reference to 64bit users having to utilise the eclipse plugin version rather than standalone. The problems occur when you install Eclipse from the Ubuntu apt repositories.

When you install Eclipse, via apt, the package “eclipse-gcj” gets installed which also pulls in the gcj runtime. This seems innocuous in itself, but the eclipse startup script checks for existence of various java runtimes to determine which it will use. The problem is the list is checked from top to bottom with the first matching runtime being utilised. This means that even when you have a more capable and complete java runtime (Sun Java 6), eclipse still uses gcj. This is a major problem, as various dialogues don’t work/appear and lots of random things are broken.

When you’re using gcj, and you install Aptana, the installation proceeds nicely and you get to the restart SDK phase. Once Eclipse reloads, you are alerted with various runtime errors and a nice dialogue from Aptana itself reporting that Aptana doesn’t support running on any runtime other than Sun’s, and that you are currently running on version 1.5 from the Free Software Foundation.

The solution to this problem can be one of two methods. The first is to manually alter the search paths to place sun higher than gcj. This involves editing /etc/eclipse/java_home. The other method requires creating a file in your eclipse user configuration directory. The contents of which are as follows:

#!/bin/sh
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
export JAVA_HOME

This file should be saved to ~/.eclipse/eclipserc, and should have the correct path to your sun java directory. (On ubuntu all java runtimes are installed to /usr/lib/jvm.)