A first look at Windows 8 reveals Metro interface challenges
6th November 2011
Even if it has been a little while, I have managed to set up a VirtualBox virtual machine to have a look at the Developer Preview of the next version of Windows, something that I and others continue to call Windows 8 though Microsoft has yet to confirm the name. When I tried the installation before, it failed on me, though that may have been due to having an earlier release of VirtualBox on my machine at that time. 4.1.14 has a preset for Windows 8 and I also happened to notice that it can create virtual hard disks that can be used with competitors like VMWare, Parallels and Virtual PC too. It's an interesting development, even if I am left wondering why you'd need to do that when VirtualBox runs on most platforms anyway.
To get back to Windows 8, the installation ran near enough without any intervention apart from stating the language you wanted to use, U.K. English in my case. On startup, the operating system presents you with a lock screen that you need to get out of the way so you can log in. It can be dragged out of your way, or you can double-click on it or use the carriage return key to get rid of it. Quite why someone thinks it's a good extra is a little beyond me, when a log in screen would suffice. Logging in gets you the new start menu or, as I prefer to think of it, screen. By default, there are a good few Metro apps installed, though I decided to rid myself of most of them.
Regarding those apps, one irritation could be that there isn't that obvious a way to switch away from them to something else. Thankfully, ALT+TAB does seem to work and it has the most instantaneous effect. Otherwise, using the Windows key or hovering over the bottom-left corner of the screen to get the menu that brings up the start screen. From the PC user's point of view, I could see this needing a little more thought because it took a little while for me to figure out what to do. Closing Metro apps isn't an option either unless you resort to the Task Manager to do so. Microsoft appears to want to leave them open from the point at which you start them until the PC is shut down. It's a design decision that leaves me unconvinced, though; thoughts of rogue apps running riot on a system come to mind. Then, a stop button could be handy.
There is no start menu as we have come to know it any more with the start screen replacing it. However, it is possible to limit what's on there to the software that you use most often and rearrange panels as you'd like them to be. Apart from hosting shortcuts for starting applications, it also acts as a task switcher like the task bar in Windows 7 and there is one of those in Windows 8 too when you jump to the desktop; handily, there's a panel for that too. Installing Firefox added a panel to the start screen, so a little thought has gone into such a common situation, and that's just as well. Still, there's more work to be done because, currently, there's no way of changing the background colour of the start screen without resorting to a hex editor or third-party tools. Still, since you can pick your own picture for the lock screen, things are not all locked down on you.
A preview of IE 10 is included and, apart from the occasional artifact when displaying one of my websites, it seems to work well enough, as does Windows Explorer. However, aside from these and a smattering of Metro apps, the Developer Preview does feel barer than previous versions of Windows. However, it does appear that applications like Notepad, PowerShell and the Command Prompt are on there, yet you need to search for these. That also means that you need to know about them too, so I'd suggest a better way of browsing the applications that are available too. This is one of the weaknesses of Ubuntu's Unity interface, and you have to search in the Dash to find them. Just starting to type in the Metro start screen (and other screens too, it seems) in Windows does trigger the completion of a search box, much like what happens in the GNOME Shell Activities screen on systems with GNOME 3. While it's good to see good ideas being reused from elsewhere, Microsoft might do well to note that you still can browse lists of applications in GNOME 3 too.
Shutting down Windows 8 also is seemingly more convoluted than is the case with Windows 7. Logging off and then powering off from the log in screen is one approach, and that was my early impression of GNOME 3 too. With the latter, I later discovered a status menu plugin that added in the option where it was accessible or that using the ALT key when clicking the status menu when the plugin wouldn't work would do what I needed. Without logging off from Windows 8, you can do a shutdown using the sidebar that appears on selecting Settings from the menu that pops up on hovering near the bottom-left corner of the start screen or the Start button of the task bar of the desktop. Then, look for the power icon and select what you need from the menu that clicking on this icon produces. Of course, you may find that the ALT+F4 key combination when issued while on a clean desktop is the cleanest of all.
All in all, the Developer Preview of the next release of Windows looks fairly usable. That is not to imply that there aren't things that need changing. Aside from this being an early sight of what may be coming to us Windows users, it isn't unknown for Microsoft to roll back on a radical move to make it more palatable to the user community. After all, it has to watch how it treats the corporate market too. The strong possibility of there being alterations is one thought that needs to be shared with those who are inclined to lose their tempers at the moment and I have seen comments with unpleasant language out there on the web (none of that here, please, by the way). As for me, I like to look ahead to be forewarned about what's coming my way in the world of computing. What I have seen so far of the next Windows release is reassuring, though there are rough edges such as PC shutdown and Metro app switching, yet Microsoft cannot commit commercial suicide either, so these have to be fixed. It appears that the world of Microsoft operating systems is in flux, with the company's keeping a firm eye on the world of mobile computing, with tablets being a major concern. While others may disagree, I can see Windows 8 working well on conventional PC's and that's no bad thing.
Sorting out MySQL on Arch Linux
5th November 2011
Seeing Arch Linux running so solidly in a VirtualBox virtual box has me contemplating whether I should have it installed on a real PC. Saying that, recent announcements regarding the implementation of GNOME 3 in Linux Mint have caught my interest, even if the idea of using a rolling distribution as my main home operating system still has a lot of appeal for me. Having an upheaval come my way every six months when a new version of Linux Mint is released is the main cause of that.
While remaining undecided, I continue to evaluate the idea of Arch Linux acting as my main OS for day-to-day home computing. Towards that end, I have set up a working web server instance on there using the usual combination of Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL. Of these, it was MySQL that went the least smoothly of all because the daemon wouldn't start for me.
It was then that I started to turn to Google for inspiration, and a range of actions resulted that combined to give the result that I wanted. One problem was a lack of disk space caused by months of software upgrades. Since tools like it in other Linux distros allow you to clear some disk space of obsolete installation files, I decided to see if it was possible to do the same with pacman, the Arch Linux command line package manager. The following command, executed as root, cleared about 2 GB of cruft for me:
pacman -Sc
The S in the switch tells pacman to perform package database synchronization, while the c instructs it to clear its cache of obsolete packages. In fact, using the following command as root every time an update is performed both updates software and removes redundant or outmoded packages:
pacman -Syuc
So I don't forget the needful housekeeping, this will be what I use from this point forward, with y being the switch for a refresh and u triggering a system upgrade. It's nice to have everything happen together without too much effort.
To do the required debugging that led me to the above along with other things, I issued the following command:
mysqld_safe --datadir=/var/lib/mysql/ &
This starts up the MySQL daemon in safe mode if all is working properly, and it wasn't in my case. Nevertheless, it creates a useful log file called myhost.err in /var/lib/mysql/. This gave me the messages that allowed the debugging of what was happening. It led me to installing net-tools and inettools using pacman; it was the latter of these that put hostname on my system and got the MySQL server startup a little further along. Other actions included unlocking the ibdata1 data file and removing the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 files to gain something of a clean sheet. The kill command was used to shut down any lingering mysqld sessions too. To ensure that the ibdata1 file was unlocked, I executed the following commands:
mv ibdata1 ibdata1.bad
cp -a ibdata1.bad ibdata1
These renamed the original and then crafted a new duplicate of it, with the -a switch on the cp command forcing copying with greater integrity than normal. Along with the various file operations, I also created a link to my.cnf, the MySQL configuration file on Linux systems, in /etc using the following command executed by root:
ln -s /etc/mysql/ my.cnf /etc/my.cnf
While I am unsure if this made a real difference, uncommenting the lines in the same file that pertained to InnoDB tables. What directed me to these were complaints from mysqld_safe in the myhost.err log file. All I did was to uncomment the lines beginning with innodb and these were 116-118, 121-122 and 124-127 in my configuration file, but it may be different in yours.
After all the above, the MySQL daemon ran happily and, more importantly, started when I rebooted the virtual machine. Thinking about it now, I believe that it was a lack of disk space, the locking of a data file and the lack of InnoDB support that was stopping the MySQL service from running. Running commands like mysqld start weren't yielding useful messages, so a lot of digging was needed to get the result that I needed. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I am sharing my experiences here.
In the end, creating databases and loading them with data were all that was needed for me to start to see functioning websites on my (virtual) Arch Linux system. It turned out to be another step on the way to making it workable as a potential replacement for the Linux distributions that I use most often (Linux Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu).