How prescient. After talking about Amoeba, Orca and other fluffy Vrije Universitat stuff, PC World just interviewed Andrew Tanenbaum. And MINIX was next on my left for OS of the week, too

Sorry for being late this week. A plethora of problems, networks that not work, kaput hardware and self-corrupting operating systems seem to have been bugging me this last week. So, a bit late, but here we are:

Professor Andrew S Tanenbaum has had a significant impact on the world of operating systems as we know it today. In order to teach operating systems, he wrote his own clone of Unix, using the most modern design techniques he could think of. (He called it Minix, and that’ll be my OS for next Thursday). This OS in turn was used by a student to start a hobby project. That hobby project became known as Linux.

What he went on to do next is potentially far more interesting and exciting than that.

The main idea of Amoeba will be familiar to you if you run any of the BOINC projects like Seti@Home. The idea is to turn multiple, inexpensive computers into one single transparent system. Imagine it this way – add a hundred thousand Commodore 64s together and you get Deep Thought.

People have been playing around with distributed programming like this for ages – witness the language Occam, for example – but this didn’t really hold enough scope for the Amoeba system. So they designed and wrote their own programming language – Orca (which I’ll talk about later in the week) – designed to make this task easy (well, easier than in Occam anyway).

It’s basically a research OS (which for those of us not researching parallel operating systems essentially means nobody’s ported Firefox to it yet), although the interface is a standard X window interface (X11R6, basically). However it can be used with a wide variety of POSIX based utilities through a library called Ajax (POSIX, if you’re not aware, is the name of the ISO standard for the behaviour of Unix-like operating systems).

The Amoeba site hasn’t been updated in a while, so if you happen to have a few old 486 machines lying around it might be fun to play with. It’s another one on my to-look-at list, so if I make any progress I’ll let you all know…

Well, so here I am, trying to install PHP and MySQL so it works on IIS.

Except, of course, it doesn’t.  At all.  Or at least, not that I can work out.

And the solution?  A Linux installation under Virtual PC, of course, what else?

So, which distribution?

Well, I started on Slackware.  So off to the website and then – can’t get onto any of the mirrors.  BitTorrent time.  GetRight doesn’t like it, so µTorrent‘s back.

I’d forgotten how well it works.  215K.  So many Windows applications like this would be about 10MB, take four or five minutes to load up and use twice the resources just to display the main page.

If you’ll remember, a while ago I had a bad experience with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, release candidate 1.

Well, it certainly seems that Microsoft did quite a bit of work following that release candidate.

Since SP1 isn’t yet available via Windows Update, so I had to go through the standalone installer route (I’ll tell you where to get them later).  But first let me give you a little bit of background as to why I decided to give it another go.

Vista was starting to run really slowly.  REALLY slowly.  In fact, nearly a month after removing the release candidate of SP1, it was again unusable.  Fortunately for me, I’d backed the machine up with Norton Ghost (disclaimer: that’s an affiliate link, before you ask), so my first job was to back everything up to my external drive.

I then got out the old trusty Windows 98 bootdisk and wiped all the partitions except my clunky Vista install.  I then created a 32GB FAT32 partition and copied the Ghost image files to that.  Then I rolled back to a Vista backup from January 2008 (well, I’m skipping a step – I went back to XP for 24 hours.  I’ll tell you why I decided not to stay that way at a later date).

The installers took a long while to download, and the installation took about an hour.  It was fairly straightforward: next, next, next, next, ok, I agree, etc.  And even though it said not to run anything during installation, it didn’t complain about Spider Solitaire

So what’s the outcome?

Not much has changed, except I have a solid computer again.  It does feel slightly faster – not much, I have to admit: the short time I spent back on XP felt faster for a while – but it does feel more reliable.

Most of the actual improvements – UEFI support, cryptographic improvements,

But file copy performance?  Seems a bit quicker, but then I usually use Directory Opus anyway, and I suspect some of those improvements will be in Windows Explorer.

As for the numerous minor tweaks made, and delays they’ve removed, I suspect they all go towards a psychological feeling things are working quicker – and they certainly seem to be to me – so it’s all good.

So the verdict?  No marks for RC1, but for the full release – I’d say seven out of ten.  Maybe it didn’t have all the performance improvements they were touting, but it’s worth the time and effort.

If you want to get hold of the standalone installers yourself, you can download the five-language standalone installer for 32-bit or 64-bit Vista (they’re 434MB and 726MB respectively, and cover English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese), or the all language version, again available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions (these are 544MB and 873MB).  Alternatively, if you’ve got a lot of PCs in your firm that will need updating, you can get the installer discs – there’s a 544MB ISO image for 32-bit PCs, as well as a 1418MB DVD ISO for both 32 and 64 bit versions.

The other day I downloaded and installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate.

Big mistake.

What had been a very reliable, happy computer, turned into a crash-prone bug monster.  Windows Explorer didn’t start properly (no response from the start menu, system tray or task bar); when killed and restarted with Task Manager the system generally had about four or five minutes before locking up completely.  And disk usage was through the roof – it reminded me of the classic “swap of death” that plagued Windows 3…  until it seized completely, of course, with even the mouse pointer frozen to the screen.

After about my seventh or eighth reboot, without being able to actually use my computer, I decided to uninstall the service pack.  Which, without being able to get to control panel very easily, was a bit challenging.  Eventually, I restarted in safe mode and used system restore to get it back off.

This doesn’t bode well, I’m thinking.  Microsoft have already released a “release candidate refresh“, which apparently solves only installation issues. Well, ironically, I didn’t have any issues installing – I just downloaded the offline version and it sat there and did it; it’s only after it was installed that the problems started.

I don’t remember a service pack causing a problem before XP service pack 2, which completely destroyed the installation on my fiancee’s computer, necessitating a nice clean re-install.  I’m hoping that SP 1 doesn’t do the same for Vista.  But I’m by no means convinced that it won’t.

Oh, and before you ask, I have now gone back to non-SP1 Vista.  And everything is running along very nicely again, thank you very for asking.