Misc.: July 2006 Archives

Heard of the windows boot loader at all? If you haven't, it's called NTLDR. It actually does a really good job of being a boot loader, too, but with on exception. It MUST reside on an NTFS partition that is the first partition on the first drive that the BIOS sees. No exceptions. Windows expects this also, and likewise, won't boot unless it's booted like that. This kinda sucks for people who want to dual-boot windows and linux, because you have to either repartition to install linux on the first drive, or live without it (gasp). You can't install linux on a second drive, and use any linux boot loader to boot windows on the first hard drive. It just doesn't work.
Solution? The MBR hack.

Windows is installed on /dev/hda1. Linux /boot on /dev/hdb1. For the hack, I recommend grub, though I haven't tried it with grub, only lilo. Why grub is recommend will become quickly apparent.

With the above situation, there is no way to boot windows up from linux. Likewise, if you swap hda with hdb, windows still won't boot. So, once you have your linux boot loader installed on hdb, you image the MBR (master boot record) to a file, copy that file to the windows partition, and add an entry to C:\boot.ini to reference it. Let me put it in a little more verbose way:

dd if=/dev/hdb of=linux.mbr bs=512 count=1

cp linux.mbr /mnt/windows

echo C:\linux.mbr="Linux" >> /mnt/windows/boot.ini

And you're done. When the computer boots up NTLDR, you'll have a "Linux" option that'll pop up grub/lilo/whatever :)

And in case you didn't catch why grub is recommended: if you use lilo, you have to update the linux.mbr file every time you upgrade your kernel... which is typically stored on NTFS. Sure, the file size won't change, but it's another manual step that could be avoided easily with grub.

On another topic, I visited the University of Utah friday, for orientation (which they actually mis-scheduled me for, so I'll go again later). After 30 seconds of poking around, their network allows anything outgoing :53/udp to anywhere in the world. Oops.

gnucash 2.0 was released today. New features? GTK 2, instead of GTK1, which is huge. The second feature worth mention (for me at least) is OFX data transfer. This is the same thing that Quicken uses to sync it's data with some banks.

It turns out that Zions Bank (my bank), uses OFX, which is a plus. I can sync all data with my bank, which is nice. But, there's one small problem.

I have no clue how to setup my bank accounts.

Help. Haha, yeah, I suck. FID, Org, Broker Id, and Server URL anyone? I might be helplessly lost here. A call to Zions revealed little: "The URL changes every time you access it." I'm pretty sure that guy was confused, else Quicken wouldn't work.

Ideas, anyone?