Debian vs Windows XP USB Support

Here is a prime example of how Debian Lenny out shines Windows XP in one small area. (Note there are probably more) I have a wireless Logitech laser mouse. There is a small USB dongle for the receiver. The mouse has been giving double clicks when single clicks are supposed to have been sent. This is very annoying so I often remove the dongle and use the touch pad. Here is where I notice the difference, when I plug the dongle back in Windows will not recognize it unless it is in the same USB port. Debian on the other-hand will recognize it and make it available immediately. Debian is much better at seeing the hardware no matter which USB port it gets plugged into. If this had been Vista, good luck getting it to work on a different port other than where installed the first time. Chalk one up to Linux.

Update Your Windows XP Product Key Easily

This post has been moved to Working With Windows.

Stop: 0X000000D1

I powered on my laptop to Windows XP a few days ago. I really haven't been using it with Windows lately preferring Fedora 11. But I had to do some banking and I have yet to move stuff to Linux in this area yet. I still want more experience with the OS before I commit this information. So on this night I logged into the bank and did what I needed to do. No problems with that. I'm logged in and I might as well check out the web and see what's going on tonight. Then it hit. At first my connection slowed to a crawl and I thought I was getting pegged by malware. So I ran a scan but it came up empty. Then I went back to surf some more but nothing would open. I pinged a site and that was okay so I re-booted the router. Still nothing. It was then that the dreaded blue screen appeared. Stop: 0X000000D1, IRQ_not_less_equal. Believe it or not but this was the very first blue screen I have ever had with this laptop. Needless to say I was a bit bummed and confirmed to myself that this is why I am going to Linux. Any way the stop error referenced the NDIS driver and I knew exactly what to do. Yesterday I finally got around to downloading the driver update from Dlink and I installed it today.No more BSOD and I'm running it right now. It is always puzzling as to why after all this time, hundreds of hours in use, the driver decided to go south. I haven't even used it except about twice a week lately to do my banking. This is just one of those Windows mysteries that hopefully Microsoft will improve with Windows 7. I admit I have been really lucky about blue screens with this laptop. I just can't figure out what happened. Well for me anyway, I will continue on my quest to learn Linux better and eventually do my banking on it too.

One of the most famous and funniest BSOD's of all time.

Using Gparted

If dual booting is something you plan on doing then Gparted will become a very useful tool. Almost all distros will have this tool installed. If not it is easily aquired via most distros' repositories. Gparted stands for Gnome Partition Editor. The current release is version 0.4.5 and is also available at Sourceforge.net. Gparted can read various file systems including fat16/32, ntfs, ext2/3 and several more. If you need to create partitions, re-size them or simply format a drive, this tool can do the job. Do you need to copy or move an entire drive? Gparted can handle this too. I have only scratched the surface in my experience using Gparted. I have re-sized partitions on a laptop running Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 on a 120GB hard drive. I was able to change the size of both partitions without data loss or downtime. Here is a view from a 20GB hard drive I am running right now. I have Puppy Linux on the first partition, Mepis 8 on the hda3 (they are out of order since I had given too much room for Puppy and used Gparted to create hda3), on hda2 is the home partition being shared by all OS's. I created an extended partition and placed logical drives within it. AntiX resides on hda7 and there are two unused spaces left over. Using Gparted to manage this hard drive makes it possible and keeps it very simple. Let's hear what tools you use to manage drives?