Thursday 29 September 2011

Windows 8

Just had a quick look at the Microsoft Build demo of Windows 8. If people thought the change from XP to Vista/7 was strange and difficult, they haven't seen anything yet! The new OS from Microsoft is most definitely aiming to compete on the same market as Google Android and Apple iOS.

Designed with touch screen technology in mind, Windows 8 looks to include several 'flickable' screens of apps instead of the traditional desktop that we've all come to know and love. Media Player and IE appear as apps on the home screen along with various other packages, such as a social networking app, a news app and various touch screen enabled games.

How this will work for currently popular software remains to be see, as initial footage of the home screen looks quite cluttered and disorganised. As far as I understand there is going to be a traditional desktop hidden away in the OS for all those traditional Windows users. I'm not sure how the smart phone approach to operating systems is going to pan out on desktops and laptops, especially older or non-touch screen systems. But maybe Microsoft will release multiple different versions of Windows 8 to cater for both, much in the way as they have released different versions of their previous offerings.

I didn't watch the whole video as it's some two hours long, but first looks are definitely teasing and this is one project I will be keeping my eyes on. If you are interesting in watching some, or all, of the video you can find it here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/KEY-0001

Monday 19 September 2011

Mounting a Samba share in Arch Linux

Today I had a need to copy some image files from a PC running Arch Linux so that I could edit them on my own PC. However the default DVD writing program in Arch Linux failed every time to record the DVD. I'm no expert in Linux but I think I'm able to have a good guess at getting things working, however I couldn't see anyway to access another computer on the network or get the DVD writer working.

Fortunately for me Google came to the rescue and directed me to the incredibly well written, and detailed, wiki for Arch Linux. Here I found a guide to creating a mount point and mapping that to a network share. Perfect!

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samba#Manual_share_mounting