XP License Availability Roadmap
Here’s what Microsoft has to say about when they will stop selling various Window XP flavors: (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx)
Under the Support Lifecycle policy, Windows desktop licenses are available for four years after general availability in all standard product distribution channels (e.g. direct OEM, System Builders, retail, and Volume Licensing programs via licenses or via downgrade rights). Licenses will continue to be available through downgrade rights available in Volume Licensing programs after end of general availability.
Windows XP Professional
Date of General Availability
December 31, 2001
Direct OEM and Retail License Availability (end date)
June 30, 2008
System Builder License Availability (end date)
January 31, 2009
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
Date of General Availability
February 11, 2003
Direct OEM and Retail License Availability (end date)
June 30, 2008
System Builder License Availability (end date)
January 31, 2009
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Date of General Availability
April 25, 2005
Direct OEM and Retail License Availability (end date)
June 30, 2008
System Builder License Availability (end date)
January 31, 2009
Windows XP Home Edition
Date of General Availability
December 31, 2001
Direct OEM and Retail License Availability (end date)
June 30, 20083
System Builder License Availability (end date)
January 31, 2009
Windows XP Media Center Edition2
Date of General Availability
October 28, 2002
Direct OEM and Retail License Availability (end date)
June 30, 2008
System Builder License Availability (end date)
January 31, 2009
3 As of April 2008, Microsoft is extending availability of Windows XP Home Edition for OEMs to install on Ultra Low-Cost PCs. The new OEM end date will be the later of either June 30, 2010, or one year after the general availability of the next version of Windows.
A few more thoughts on this (and loop holes):
How-to get Windows XP past the June 30th cutoff (or not)
How to Get Windows XP After June 30
Posted by Karl Herrick on April 14th, 2008 in Microsoft, Windows | No Comments »
Recovery Discs
Checking the Vista Home Premium recovery disc on this AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core Acer before installing Debian 4.0. MythTV backend coming up.
Posted by Karl Herrick on April 8th, 2008 in Linux, MythTV | No Comments »
Watching MooFlow
I’ve been hacking around with and watching the development of MooFlow over the last few days. It looks and works pretty nice in most browsers and has quite a few options to play with. In this MooFlow demo posted, most options are enabled and the images are imported from page.html.
Other examples at the MooFlow site showcase some of the other features, like images that have external links attached to special buttons, drop down descriptions that float over the image, and the ability to get your images via JSON.
The development version still has a few noticeable bugs:
In Firefox 2.0.0.12: When resizing the stage (bottom right button), the quicklook button shows. When pressed, the image appears under the stage. The user may not realize this until the stage is restored to it’s normal size.
In IE7: When clicking the quicklook button, the image is not zoomed to full size.
Even though there are a few bugs to be worked out, MooFlow already looks great. Not to mention all of the ways it could be used. It even accepts keyboard and mouse scroll input. What’s not to like?
Posted by Karl Herrick on March 29th, 2008 in Javascript, Web Development | No Comments »
Client to Server Backups
I have intentions to look into Bacula as a disk-to-disk backup solution, however until then I am using the following script for Kubuntu Dapper -> Debian Etch backups, and a modified one for Windows XP Home -> Debian Etch.
It all uses rsync, and requires password-less key based ssh connections. I am using rsync, OpenSSH, and for Windows XP a little Cygwin magic (including modifying this script to make it Windows friendly).
client-to-server-rsync-backup.sh
#!/bin/bash
#ver 1.0.3
BACKUPSERVERUSER=limitedUserOnServer
BACKUPSERVER=serverHostName
BACKUPCLIENT=`echo $(hostname -s) | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`
BACKUPS=(
#localFolder,backupDestinationParentFolder
#/home,/media/md2/backups/clientname
#/var/www,/media/md2/backups/clientname/var
)
if [ "$1" != "--incremental" ] && [ "$1" != "--sync" ] && [ "$1" != "--help" ]; then
echo $0: missing operand
echo Try `$0 --help' for more information.
elif [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then
echo " Usage: $0 [OPTION]... [PASSTHROUGH OPTIONS]";
echo "";
echo " Mandatory arguments:";
echo " [OPTION]";
echo " --incremental add to the existing backups";
echo " --sync sync the live data with the existing backup";
echo "";
echo " Optional arguments:";
echo " [PASSTHROUGH OPTIONS]";
echo " Passthrough options are sent to rsync in this form from this script:";
echo "";
echo " for incremental:";
echo " sudo rsync -avz [PASSTHROUGH OPTIONS] $SOURCE $BKUPSRVUSER@ \";
echo " $BKUPSRV:$DEST";
echo "";
echo " and for sync:";
echo " sudo rsync -avz [PASSTHROUGH OPTIONS] --delete $SOURCE \";
echo " $BKUPSRVUSER@$BKUPSRV:$DEST";
echo "";
echo " * This makes it easy to do something like this:";
echo " * $0 --incremental \"--partial --progress\"";
echo " *";
echo " * Thus sending \"--partial --progress\" to rsync,";
echo " * making this script a little more interactive...";
echo " * read more via `man rsync'.";
else
if [ "$1" = "--incremental" ]; then
incremental_or_sync="";
elif [ "$1" = "--sync" ]; then
incremental_or_sync="--delete";
fi
for BACKUPS in ${BACKUPS[@]}; do
SOURCE=`echo $BACKUPS | cut -d',' -f1`
DESTINATION=`echo $BACKUPS | cut -d',' -f2`
echo
echo "# starting backup"
echo "# from: $BACKUPCLIENT:$SOURCE"
echo "# to: $BKUPSRV:$DEST"
echo
echo sudo rsync -avz $2 $inc_or_sync $SOURCE $BKUPSRVUSER@$BKUPSRV:$DEST
sudo rsync -avz $2 $inc_or_sync $SOURCE $BKUPSRVUSER@$BKUPSRV:$DEST
echo
done
fi
Posted by Karl Herrick on March 15th, 2008 in Backups, Windows, Linux, Bash | No Comments »
Connecting MySQL with OpenOffice Base
OpenOffice Base makes it incredibly easy to hook up to a MySQL database. Once this is accomplished you can easily create a front end to browse through your data, edit it, report on it, etc. Below are a few steps I took to create a functional setup:
What I did was:
- Have OpenOffice installed
- Access to a database (for this example I used my wp_posts table from Wordpress) from the workstation running OpenOffice
- Downloaded MySQL® Connector/J and installed
- Within OpenOffice clicked, “Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Java > Class Path… > Add Archive…”
- Selected “mysql-connector-java-5.1.5-bin.jar” or current version
- Restarted OpenOffice (had to make sure the process was fully “killed”)
- Created a new database within OpenOffice
- Within OpenOffice, clicked “File > New > Database”
- clicked the “Connect to an existing database” radio button
- selected “MySQL” from the drop down list
- clicked the “Next >>” button
- selected the “Connect using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)” radio button
- clicked the “Next >>” button
- entered the “Name of the database” into the text field
- entered the MySQL “Server URL” into the text field
- clicked the “Test Class” button and received “The JDBC driver was loaded successfully”
- clicked the “Next >>” button
- entered as “User name” into the text field
- checked the “Password required” checkbox
- clicked the “Finish” button and save
- Made a form based on wp_posts:
- This screenshot is of the form I made to browse the raw data of my Wordpress posts from my Thoughts and Notions weblog and is showing data from this post in particular:
Posted by Karl Herrick on February 17th, 2008 in Wordpress, OpenOffice | No Comments »
