Windows Reinstall, IDEA vs Eclipse, Ubuntu Natty

Soon after installing SP 1, it looked like my Windows 7 installation was hanging on boot. A few impatient hard reboots later I had a consistent BSOD. (0x0000007B (0xFFFFF880009A9928, 0xFFFFFFFFC0000034, 0x00000000000000000 0x0000000000000000)) Startup repair didn’t help and neither did any utilities I could think of, whether available from startup repair or not. Safe mode wouldn’t boot and would hang on classpnp.sys. I tried fixmbr, and then realized that restoring GRUB when running with an encrypted root partition is more complicated. I should have just backed up the bootloader to an image, but I didn’t. Luckily, someone more knowledgeable than I had the same problem (though not for as foolish a reason) and I found their guide. sfc /scannow didn’t fix it. Some forums suggested deleting classpnp.sys, which didn’t help; it just started rebooting without displaying a message. Copying the classpnp.sys from a machine also running Home Premium 64-bit just restored it to the BSOD. I ended up reinstalling Windows 7. I moved my files to my Linux backup partition and back while booted into Linux, and in retrospect given how much fragmentation it caused I should have installed over it and just copied from the Windows.old directory on the new installation. I assume that the Linux NTFS drivers are to blame for the high levels of fragmentation, and that Windows would handle it far better.

While Eclipse works, it is rather sluggish and the UI is clunky. Thanks to ##java on Freenode, I’m now using IDEA. It’s somewhat different, and it doesn’t have the ANT error-checking that Eclipse has, but I prefer it. The interface is less cluttered and it feels easier to devote more of my screen to the actual source code. I think the reason is as simple that the buttons to hide windows are larger, toggle, and don’t move. The ANT problem I ran into took a while to figure out. IDEA was nice enough to offer to pull code down from GitHub, but although the resulting code compiled, the .jars didn’t run correctly. Being reduced to diffing the directories, I discovered that IDEA didn’t catch the ANT problems that Eclipse did, and upon fixing those it worked.

I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu Natty, and I don’t like the new interface. I don’t think it works very well. For instance, it’s very easy to remove an item from the dock, but dragging an item to change the order takes too long. This is probably due to the necessity of differentiating between scrolling the contents and dragging a single item. It’s not intuitive. Similarly, adding an icon to the bar is as easy as dragging, but it only stays in the bar if the thing that was dragged there remains. I’m glad GDM presents the Ubuntu Classic option. My desktop’s upgrade process to Natty was very much unlike the three other machines I’ve upgraded uneventfully. Not only did GRUB install unsuccessfully, which resulted in symbol not found : 'grub_env_export', (following the above guide again fixed it) but something about my motherboard led to a very long hang on boot after NET: Registered protocol family 1. At least there are bugs filed for the former and the latter, but I’m glad I wasn’t also hit by this one. Perhaps this will lead to me reading the release notes before an upgrade. However, I don’t see mention of these issues in the release notes, which worries me that it won’t be enough.

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