I am waiting for Longhorn. Thus, I was very interested in the new 4051 build. Here are my findings.
Disclaimer: I first want to state that the software being previewed is in [pre-]alpha, meaning that every feature, every bug, and every other thing can be completely different from the final product, currently due two to three years from now. I wish to state this obvious thing here, so that I do not need to emphasize it every time. Most importantly, I wish to state that the GUI presented in this build is temporary.
Installation
The new installation procedure for Windows is really a step forward, especially if you look at it from the end-user’s point-of-view, since the ‘text’-based part from the XP install has been removed. I do not think an installation can get much easier than this, I believe only LindowsOS 4.0 is more easily installed.
Still, there were two glitches during the installation that are worth mentioning. The first problem I encountered can be seen as my own fault, but, on the other hand, also as a shortcoming from Microsoft’s side. I created a partition for this new build using DiskDrake in my main OS, Mandrake 9.2. I rebooted using the Longhorn CD, only to encounter, after two thirds of the install, an error, stating that Windows Install could not initiate the third stage of the install. After some time I found out the problem: I accidentally created an extended partition for 4051 with DiskDrake. Of course this can be seen as a mistake from my side (I should have created a primary one, obviously), but I do not think that that is the whole story. In 2003, you should expect Windows to recognize the fact that the partition I selected was an extended one, and it should have warned me at the beginning. Of course you could also say that in 2003, Windows should have the ability to install on an extended partition, but that is a different story.
I created a primary partition and the problem was solved. But only to encounter another bug: Windows did not install its bootloader! It did erase my LiLo, but it did not replace it with anything else, leaving me unable to boot into Longhorn. I actually had to install LiLo again to boot into Longhorn. TouchŽ…
First Impressions
Sidebar. That is the word that pops into my mind when speaking about first impressions. That thing is really big, black and ugly. I have got nothing against sidebars (if you do, try QNX, its sidebar rocks!), but the one in this build is just too ‘present’. It might have to do with the fact that the sidebar is nearly empty, and that when filled with plug-ins, it is going to look all nice and pretty. But for now, it is better to just minimize the darn thing. The only five items (tiles) you can add to the sidebar in this build are the system tray, quicklaunch, the clock, a slide show (never quite understood what that is good for anyway), and a ‘sync’ tile, which synchronizes, for example, the available Offline Web Pages. Since I do not use Offline Web Pages at all, it is quite a useless tile to me, but, then again, that is just me.
A lot has been said about the new ‘Slate’ theme for this build. Before I actually used Slate, I was very skeptical. Judging by the screenshots released all around the net, I found it too big, too much wasted space, and so on. But now that I have used for a few days, I can say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. The screenshots on the web must have been pretty low-res, and thus making the widgets look larger. But, as you can see by my 1280×1024 screenshots, the widgets aren’t that big and clumsy. They are way smaller than in Luna. The use of black is a relief, a huge improvement compared to the sugarcoated Luna.
Outlook Express 7 And Internet Explorer
IE has been given some new features and a new coat. New features are the download manager and the pop-up blocker. I know, not really innovative, but still very useful. And about the new layout, I love it! It brings forward the features you use the most (back/forward and address bar) and puts the lesser-used features on the background (stop, reload etc.). This will probably be a personal thing, but I like it. Please try not to judge before you have actually used it. I was also skeptical, but I have changed my mind.
There is not much to say about Outlook Express 7, on the other hand. It mainly has gotten a make-over, but nothing very impressive crossed my path during use (exception is the new way you manage contacts, but more later on this subject). And if you forget the security issues involved, OE has always been a pretty good email-client (yes, it must be said), so any changes aren’t really necessary. There is only one thing I do not understand: why haven’t they incorporated the vertical preview pane? That is really a mystery to me, as it can be found in Outlook 2003.
Compatibility
Something also kind of important is whether older applications/drivers will work when using 4051 (although I do not think anyone is going to use this build in a production environment).
The first driver I tried to install was the Ate Catalyst driver, version number 6.14.10.6396, for my ATI Radeon 9000 video card. This would prove to be impossible. After the install failed, it advised me to try to set the default VGA driver first, but this would not help either. I was forced to use the ATI driver supplied by Microsoft, version number 6.14.10.6368. Not really a problem though, as this driver seems to be working just fine, but still, I like to have the latest drivers installed.
The second driver I wanted to install was my soundcard driver, a C-Media 8738-based 5.1 soundcard. This driver installed without a hassle.
Applications I tried to install ranged from MSN Messenger 6.1 (ran just fine), Office 2003 Beta II (custom install including: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook 2003, all worked seamlessly), Opera 6.21 (my favorite browser, also ran without a hassle), and the same goes for my other favorite browser, FireBird 0.7.
Of course I cannot try every application, but given the fact that the above seem to work just fine, I assume that the number of incompatible programs is small.
WinFS
The first benefit of WinFS can be found when you open the “My Computer” window (now known just as “Computer”, by the way), in the form of the “Contacts” folder. Here, contacts are shown as files, with editable tags, much like .mp3 tags. Email addresses, phone numbers etc. can be entered here. Double-clicking opens an easy-to-use dialog that you can use to edit the tags. Take a look at the screenshot. Upon starting Windows/MSN messenger for the first time, contacts from that source are automatically imported.
Whether you find this useful or not is completely a matter of taste. Although I never used ‘contacts’ anyway (the mail addresses I need are all stored in my MSN list, and besides that, I have the good old (mobile) phone), for companies this might be very interesting. It surely eases the customization of your contacts list.
Another new feature is the “defaultstore” folder. This folder, using a network folder icon, does some interesting things. When a number of, let’s say, pictures is copied into this directory, it can sort those files in a number of ways, to your liking. These include “name” (obviously), “date taken”, “size”, “dimensions”, “date modified” and “lens aperture”. These sorting methods have sub-options, which you can use to filter the pictures. You can, for example, select to only show pictures with a resolution of 1280×1024. Of course different sorting methods are available for different types of files.
Another, more interesting, sorting method is “stack by …”. This will produce stacks, showing, physically, how much is in each stack. When I used the “stack by name” option, for example, it produced two stacks: “A-H” and “I-P”, with the latter having three pieces of paper, and the former only one, and thus telling me that the “I-P” contains more pictures than “A-H”. These stacks are handled like directories. Nice features, and I hope to see more of this, soon.
Stability:
Speaking about stability is not very fair of course, in the pre-alpha stage. But, besides 4051 being very slow (loading the sidebar/startpanel alone takes about five to ten minutes), it is more stable than I had expected. I also must say that I did not use any tweaking guides and/or patches. I will include a paragraph describing the speed improvements gained from doing so. I have experienced two reboots in 4 days, for a pre-alpha that is not all that bad. How it will turn out in the end is of course impossible to say.
The Build After The Tweak
Using the tweak guide, you can seriously improve both speed and stability in this new build. The actions taken to achieve this, range from uninstalling certain Windows components (WinFS, for example, a real strain on your system’s resources), to disabling all kinds of services (much as in the tweaking guides for older builds). The improvements are remarkable: loading the startpanel/sidebar is reduced from five to ten minutes to a matter of seconds, programs load much faster, and so on. When using Longhorn for a longer period of time, I seriously recommend performing the tweaks.
There are also some drawbacks of course; disabling WinFS for example has some serious consequences: Outlook 7 will not start, since the new contacts system relies on WinFS. There are probably some other setbacks as well that I have not encountered yet.
Conclusion
It is very difficult to draw any conclusions at this early stage. With the final release being years ahead of us, there is not really anything sane to say about where Microsoft is heading. All I can do is try to give an objective judgment of where this ‘version’ of Windows stands, compared to its predecessors.
If this version of Windows were more stable, it would be an excellent candidate for a (free) upgrade, in my opinion. The reworking of the GUI and the newer versions of IE and OE could be released as a sort of upgrade, maybe even through Windows Update. The new features are highly needed in modern-day computing; pop-up blockers, download managers, new GUI features are improvements people have been asking for. Of course, one could install Opera, of course, one could install WindowBlinds, but hey, what does the average Windows user know about that? You do not miss what you do not know.
It could also bridge the gap between now and Longhorn’s release (a lot of complaining has been going on about that issue).
As for me, Longhorn is going to stay on my computer for a while, because I like messing around with software that has not been finished yet.
People might say that this release is just XP with a new coat. They are completely right, in my opinion. But darn, that new coat looks nice.
Test Machine:
– AMD Athlon XP 1600+
– MSI K-7T Turbo2
– ATI Radeon 9000 128 MB DDR-RAM
– CMI8738-based soundcard
– Compaq v75 17″ monitor
– LG DVD-Drive
– Samsung CD-R(RW)
– Realtek 8139-based network card
– Microsoft Trackball Optical USB
– Standard PS/2 keyboard
i dunno, there is something about it that attracts me, i like the new gui and the way they layout the tools, i hate the sidebar though.
it looks like a huge resource hog though, and im not too big on the bubbly look in XP.
i wonder how linux will be when longhorn comes out, it would be very interesting to see. all i know is that i’ll still have my good old debian installed, maybe version 4.0 by then, and kernel 2.8
=)
I thought that this version was missing the cool new features that were going to make it new.. Such as WinFS, Avalon and whatever the network stack was called,incognito or something.
While it is more of a nuisance than a show-stopper, no modern OS should require a primary partition on the PC platform. Why not support running from extended partitions?
Of course, Longhorn is not the only OS with that failing, nor is it the only one with an installer that goes right ahead with an installation that won’t work. But you’d think that Microsoft could afford to hire someone to fix this irritation.
do you have in the test machine?
Did I really forget that? Ow my god I’m ashamed…
512 MB, pc-133.
LiefKleinMeisje (??), read the disclaimer.
…
nice use of MS Paint in the screenshots. I would’ve used blur in photoshop, but thats just be
I have to say they haven’t gone that far away from what they have now with what they have at the moment. I expect major changes, especially it it will take another 1 or 2 years to finish it. The slow loading, I’m wondering if they are programming it for the new CPUs that will be running twice as fast as they are now when Longhorn comes out, or is it really a memory hog and 512 isn’t enough anymore. I’m also wondering if a virus could be writen to use the WinFS way of sorting against the operating system in anyway, and the fact that if you disable it, makes some MS software not run. So far my verdict is a “not that impressed”, but I hope they change that.
You don’t guge a operating system on it’s looks.
Will win32 still be supported ?
Will things like wxWindows still run under longhorn , given wxWindows written apps a native look ?
If you want to know what Longhorn transparent GUI looks like, go to this webpage (note: for IE browser only). The webpage is done with a lot of CSS stuff, so it is very slow (i.e. your browser didn’t crash). You can click and move the transparent windows around.
http://w3future.com/2003/glass/glass.html
I am still waiting to be impressed. To be honest, except for some minor behind the scenes improvements, Windows 98 works just fine for me. I use 98 on my personal PC ( loads a bit slowly as compared to XP ), Win 2000 on my work PC ( not too much terribly different than Win 98 except for some utilities ), and XP on my wife’s machine ( horrible interface for an experienced user or programmer – however, utilities to handl CD writers are very well done in XP ).
To be honest, I would just love the same interface as 98, but with the vastly improved utilities.
If it is going to take 2 years to develop the system – I expect to be greatly impressed. Time will tell.
“You don’t guge a operating system on it’s looks.
Will win32 still be supported ?
Will things like wxWindows still run under longhorn , given wxWindows written apps a native look ?”
how in the hell could you think Microsoft could break existing apps? Note: XP look must be activated by the developer, not all apps are automatically XP look! So wxWindows require to support new looks…
Interesting effect..
…it doesn’t impress me at all. That dumbed down Fisher Price interface doesn’t look serious to me. I hate menus with “Burn to CDs” or stuff like that. If I really want to burn something to CD, I will start the program. That said, can you disable that option?
I like the sidebar alot. Right now the 4051 build has a memory leak wit the sidebar so you have to disable it to get it to work properly. I have Longhorn on a AMD Duron 700 mhz machine and it runs good. Microsoft does reccomend a 1 ghz machine and a 3D accelerated Graphics card
I must say, I like Slate a whole lot better than Luna. Much more down to earth. It needs a lot of refining (’bout the icons, they look pixelated because that haven’t been converted to vector graphics yet) but it looks like its getting there. Hopefully, MS won’t pull a fast one on us and replace the pretty Whistler UI with the ugly Luna.
Anyone recal Whistler? Whistler was a kick-ass OS, it was exactaly what I wanted XP to be.. but when XP came out it was 2k with a skin, some wizards, and an new help system. *yay*
Joe Barr hit the nail on the head. (agin)
http://www.newsforge.com/trends/03/11/10/1715213.shtml?tid=137
I havent seen XP in corprate use at all some even still use 9x and NT, I honestaly believe XP isent selling well within the enterprise.. Think about it.. every 2 days there is a Longhorn story… it wont even run till 2006.
“You don’t gauge an operating system on it’s looks.”
Maybe not completely, but the look should reflect an intuitiveness and ease of use that just isn’t present here. Frankly, it looks even more hideous than XP. I didn’ think that was possible. The sidebar is horrendous.
Window and menu transparency is nothing new, either.
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-gui/macos-x-gui-5.h…
<< and XP on my wife’s machine ( horrible interface for an experienced user or programmer – however, utilities to handl CD writers are very well done in XP ). >>
I a a programmer and experienced user and I love the XP interface. I like the XP interface on Windows and Keramik on Linux. I really dislike OS Xs’ interface. I was very disappointed in Apple for that one.
I like the XP interface on Windows and Keramik on Linux. I really dislike OS Xs’ interface.
I find the XP interface quite bad but Keramik is even more crappy to me. I *hate* it. It’s so ugly… I prefer the default theme of GNOME. My personal favorite is Ximian’s Industrial. But hey, different people, different tastes. I prefer something that is clean.
Does Microsoft have an original bone in their collective body?
A blatant copy of the new Apple theme. Metal everywhere…
I was under the impression that Outlook Express 7 uses WinFS instead of proprietary .dbx files of earlier versions to store email locally. BeOS users may be familiar with the potential benefits of this arrangement.
Certainly that would qualify as more than a makeover.
Can the sidebar be dynamically resized or is it fixed width? If it is resized do all of the controls loaded in it resize with it (scaling text and graphics)??
That second part may not be possible without the new graphics system though.
It’s advanced composite materials
Ummm, I don’t know what corporations your looking at but almost everyone I’ve stumbled across is (slowly) migrating to Windows XP. The stability improvements alone are worth the upgrade compared to the POS WinNT/98 codebase. Then there’s the fact that, in a large corporate enviroment, RDP is EXTREMELY helpful. Every tried to tech support a computer located around the world? Yea, phones suck for that.
I’m honestly looking forward to Longhorn and I’m not going to make any judgements till its released. For all those who say its a blatant ripoff in look from OS X, well Apple has blatantly ripped off other OS’s and technologies before, every large corporation does it at some time. Whats even funnier though is that Slate isn’t the final look for the UI of Longhorn. Aero is, and its not out. It was only demo’d.
I’m honestly confused. I was under the impression that IE would not exist as a stand-alone app anymore.
(http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-1011859.html)
I *assumed* that it would be integrated within the OS somehow, not even a app (per se) to launch, just another feature of the OS perhaps? Why would there be a new version of IE?
Its the first thing I thought when I saw it. It is most definately brushed metal. Well, there are worse things they could copy.
@Wrawrat: I agree about Keramik, but its *much* prettier when you take out those annoying toolbar gradients. ThinKeramik is overall pretty nice too. Plastik, however, is reallly nice. I switch up between Plastik, ThinKeramik, and .NET as the mood strikes me
Animated windows with a “greyish” nay metal look. All with rounded corners to boot. If this isn’t looking more and more like OSX (especially 10.3) and it’s brushed metal skin, I don’t know what is.
I think this was a good look at things. I’m really liking this slate look. Unfortently part of me just see’s this not being around come longhorn production time. But maybe they will make things better.
I thought the new no driver letter deal looked nice. I was blown away though. You have 2 FLOPPY DRIVES! even having one is uncommon for many now. Granted I wish i still had one everynow and then. I ditch it with my new computer, but the world still runs on floppies, so that is an issue.
I’m happy they ditched “my computer” for computer. Suddle change. I just change it to “home” anyways. At least windows is happy enough to let you change it’s name and reflect that system wide. “my computer” just always seamed like a goofy name. I do wish they would nuke My documents, My music, …. and the like. I know of very few people in the world who use them. And they become anoying when things want to default save to them.
Also you mentioned the slide show feature, if this is like the bit in XP that allows you to veiw photos quickly then I have to say it is a great feature, it’s on of those things that will never let me go back to earlier version of windows, not that i would want to for any reason. I’ve seen people comment on the point of this app before. I don’t know how one doesn’t find it great. It makes scanning through photos or showing them to friends real quick so easy.
At this point in time i’m not very worried about speed. I bet most of the slowness is just because it’s not production. I’m sure the final version will be fast. Every version of windows gets quicker. Also by the time it comes out most of use will be running 2+ ghz athlon64s and 5 ghz prescotts. I doubt speed will be an issue. And I doubt many are going to bother putting it on hardware much slower then what you have, though it will probably be fine. XP runs on a PII 400 just fine, I don’t see why Longhorn won’t run on a 1ghz PIII just fine.
I must say it is tempting to try this out. Guess it’s good to be a developer
Hello? Brushed metal? Brushed metal is different– brushed metal doesn’t ‘shine’! This does– maybe it isn’t clear in the .jpg shots– but there’s nothing brushed there, I can assure you.
Apple releases OS X 10.0 with Aqua (white) and suddenly the betas of XP change their skin completely from something Win2K’ish (with little blocks like the default Gnome 1.4) into the abomination known as Luna, which bears a suspicious resemblance to Aqua with its use of primary colours on the buttons and a glossy look.
Now in 2003 Apple seems to be steering more towards its brushed aluminium skin with Panther.. and suddenly the Longhorn betas switch from Luna to Slate (?) which looks even more like Apple’s brushed aluminium than Luna mimics Aqua.
..and then there’s a story on OSNews where Ballmer says “it’s all about innovation”. Please excuse me while I get stuck in a fit of maniacal laughter for the next few minutes.. just too funny. What’s up with that HUGE clock anyway?
That’s the name of the theme Thom. It is a look and feel clone all the way. Don’t believe me? Call up iTunes, on the PC even, and put it up against Eugenia’s screenshots of explorer.
Hank– I know what brushed metal is–it’s not just a theme, it has become a complete style. Slate is as similair to Brushed Metal as a Fiat Panda is similair to an Audi TT.
what is the deal with this insane amout of wasted space on top of every window?
Get real! Open iTunes, place it overtop of her screenshot and see for yourself. They even used the exact same corner radius as the Apple interface. I checked it against LUNA, which used a slightly different one. Then you have the style of the buttons, et cetera. None of that was anywhere to be seen before “Brushed Metal” and now it shows up in Longhorn. I’d say your comparison would be better if you were talking about comparing an Audi A4 to a VW Passat.
Apparantly it has something to do with the avarage user getting widescreen TFT’s in the near future. Microsft probably thought they could remove some of the extra desktop real-estate by adding a huge side-bar to the GUI
*cringe*
I think the reviewer missed the point of Longhorn entirely :/
— Speaking about stability is not very fair of course, in the pre-alpha stage. —
Wrong, it’s Milestone 7 internally at the moment, which is far into the Alpha stage of development. Pre-alpha is called White Box, which means concept mockups done in Photoshop and with pens on paper. Soon as code is comitted to the Longhorn CVS, it becomes Alpha.
— WinFS, for example, a real strain on your system’s resources —
WinFS is only a high-resource application if you run it with default parameters. 4051 (and all other leaked builds) are designed to be run on Dual Xeon workstations with over 2Gb of RAM, at MS HQ. If you want to run it on a little P4 2Ghz with 256mb, then you need to reconfigure WinFS in order to reduce the resource usage. This allows you to keep all the functionality, but with less back-caching of the DB in active memory.
Also, installing MSDE/Yukon can have pretty much the same effect, as it manages the FS meta database more efficiently.
— If this version of Windows were more stable, it would be an excellent candidate for a (free) upgrade, in my opinion. The reworking of the GUI and the newer versions of IE and OE could be released as a sort of upgrade, maybe even through Windows Update. —
What the fuck? That’s like saying that OS X could have been released as a free upgrade to OS 9; or Windows 95 as a free upgrade to DOS.
The underlying core of LH is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to XP’s; the majority of the kernel code was based on Windows .NET (Server 2003), which is why the first compiled builds of Longhorn followed the same version numbers as .NET Server did, before it went final, and Longhorn’s build was reset to 4000.
Also, the re-written versions of IE and OE are simply not portable, replicatable, etc, on anything other than Longhorn itself. They rely on a heavily modified GDI system, with rendering done through DX .NET aka Milrender aka DCE (Desktop Composition Engine).
That’s like saying “Oh, lets port Safari to OS 9.” Isn’t going to happen – a) Cocoa didn’t exist back then, b) the kernel wasn’t UNIX-based, and c) the GUI infrastructure had no support for rounded windows, shadows, brushed metal, etc…
Same things apply to Longhorn in regard to XP.
I suspect the gap between Windows and Desktop Linux is going to grow bigger with this release. What do you think?
Everything looks so gaudy. I really don’t like the looks of this beast.
“It’s great that Microsoft is now including alpha transparency features that Mac OS X started with in 10.0 (March 2001).”
It’s great that Apple finally got around to including that in OS X when MS had it in Windows 2000.
I personally find the slate theme to be a hideous waste of space, but it’s likely that you’ll be able to revert to the good old Windows 2000 look. (I do it whenever I’m stuck in front of an XP machine
I am curious about these memory leaks that are popping up in Longhorn. I was under the impression that the Longhorn API was going to be a superset of the .NET, and that things like memory leaks aren’t supposed to happen in .NET managed code. Please correct me if I’m worng.
I would also like to know if the existing code like Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer etc. will be .NET managed code. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why they wouldn’t be at this stage in the game. Again, please correct me if I’m worng.
I think that if Microsoft can stick to the plans they’ve laid out for Longhorn, that it’ll be quite an interesting and useful OS. I can also see them cutting corners along the way, and pushing out something half-baked like Windows ME.
No, I don’t hate Microsoft, I just don’t like a lot of the things that they do. Longhorn could be great.
what is the deal with this insane amout of wasted space on top of every window?
innovation: turns a 1600×1200 display into a 640×480 display!
I suppose they didn’t converted everything to .NET… or maybe they just hit some bugs in their API. Anyway, they’re in the alpha stage so things like that are expected IMO.
MS will find a way to dork things up. Plus, they’ve never met a projected release date. It may be 4 years out.
d@
“I am curious about these memory leaks that are popping up in Longhorn. I was under the impression that the Longhorn API was going to be a superset of the .NET, and that things like memory leaks aren’t supposed to happen in .NET managed code. Please correct me if I’m worng.”
Userspace is managed. Kernelspace is still unmanaged in Longhorn. Also, in the current leaked builds and the PDC build, most of the applications and the shell is still unmanaged.
“I would also like to know if the existing code like Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer etc. will be .NET managed code. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why they wouldn’t be at this stage in the game. Again, please correct me if I’m worng.”
These are supposed to be upgraded to managed equivalents. Currently, they are still unmanaged.
last post was from me.
Linux will be much more mature by then. And if anything the gap will be smaller or Linux will have actually passed Windows by then.
So you think I’m a Linux user? Well, I use Lindows 4.0 (not ROOT) as part time play machine. But my main machine is a 800mhz G4 iMac Lamp with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). This is also going to be more mature and with three, four, or maybe even five more major updates between now and then (OS X 10.7 or 10.8?), MS will be desperately trying to keep up with the new looks Apple puts out while trying more and more to have more and more propriatary restrictions.
No thanks. I’ll stick to other OSs. And yes, if you can see, my work machine is a Mac G3 tower with Panther and I have no problems getting all my work done (including communcating with people that have Office XP) without problems.
Windows isn’t any fun. You have to work around too much of what I want to do and MS doesn’t want me to do.
What is my job at work? Seriously. I fix XP machines all day long. Hmmm. I’ve never had to fix my Mac OS X machines…
Not trolling. Just the facts.
Thanks for the input. I think that it’d be pretty sweet if they become managed in Longhorn.
I’ve had a quick look at longhorn 4051, and compared to the Luna theme, Slate looks really nice. The one big problem I had with Luna was the huge size of the window furniture. Those title bars took up far too much screen real estate. Slate addresses this by reducing the size of the furniture down to the aprox. the same amount of space used by the classic ‘skin’. I much prefer the dark grey/black colour to the blue/olive/silver colours of XP.
Speaking of the classic skin, I am dissapointed to say that it looks really ugly. It just doesn’t look right because of the new layout of explorer windows. – I hope they make the classic ‘skin’ more classic than it is at the moment before the final release.
They still haven’t made all the windows themes consistant – run XP with the luna theme and open a command prompt to see what I mean – The same is true of 4051 longhorn – Minor issue? maybe, but I like all my windows to have a consistant theme.
I installed it into a Vmware machine, and when it started up for the first time in 640×480, the taskbar, sidebar and the start menu totally filled the screen.
As usual most of the ‘view’ options need reversing to make the system anything like usable.
Will I upgrade my primary OS from XP to longhorn when it is released? – In 4051’s current state – no, I’ll stick with XP or move to Gentoo. – I think it’s far too early to decide.
“Win 2000 on my work PC ( not too much terribly different than Win 98 except for some utilities )”
I’m sure you are trolling, but I’ll bite anyway.
Are you serious? They may look similar (kind of), but that is as far as it goes.
You say Windows XP is a terrible experience for a experienced user or programmer, but I seriously doubt that you are qualified to make this assumption, based upon your post.
What about network compatibility? It’s the only thing i’m really interested in, and it’s not covered in the review. Does it include a NFS implementation? Does it still use SMB?
“Most importantly, I wish to state that the GUI presented in this build is temporary.”
What kind of use does it have to cover this when it’s not gonna be in the final build? There is no usage, talking about an OS which will NOT be ready in 2 years is useless imo. Microsoft loves to talk about it though, and they need it, because we’re in a recession.
Oh, and someone explain me why are comments in this thread censored whilst the innovation thread a troll of a CEO is posted containing a heavy discussion and garbage one-liners of which the latter is kept untouched?
If you’re biased, at least don’t show it.
Can it install itself in a dual-boot system, or will it automaticly opt to overwrite my MBR without prompting me?
If it can’t install into a dual-boot system easily I’ll keep my win2k partition for games until games stop working with it. Then I’ll get rid of all my Microsoft software.
Either they can choose to play nice and fair or I won’t play with them at all.
Dude I will stick to linux desktop. I dont want to risk my pc to security holes and blue screen of death
I want to know how much shit these people try to run that causes so damn many bsod? I have ran xp since rc1 and have never had a bsod, even while running upwards of 15-20 applications at once, i have had 5 week uptimes rebooting only for new drivers, same with win2k. Those who claim constant bsod are trolls who use crap left over from win9x days
People are spending way to much time complaining about the so called waste of desktop real estate in that large window bar without making an effort or let alone acknowledge why the folks at Microsoft did that. Hell, beta-1 doesn’t come out till summer at the eairlest and the current build from given to developers is not a beta.
Take a closer look at this image;
[ http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/pdc2003_hillel_aero_07.j… ]
or this one
[ http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/lh_aero_demystified.jpg ]
Uh, you failed to make a point here…
“These are supposed to be upgraded to managed equivalents. Currently, they are still unmanaged.”
if you have build a skyscraper a couple of yours ago you don’t build him again or rebuild him only because there are new stones that are different. Do you know how hard it is to build or rebuild a application that large, how many developers work on such projects and how many lines of code it takes?
Heh.
http://www.codeproject.com/managedcpp/Quake2.asp
Microsoft’s crack team of coding monkies should be able to move their old apps over to managed code with little difficulty if they really wanted to.
“I want to know how much shit these people try to run that causes so damn many bsod? I have ran xp since rc1 and have never had a bsod, even while running upwards of 15-20 applications at once, i have had 5 week uptimes rebooting only for new drivers, same with win2k. Those who claim constant bsod are trolls who use crap left over from win9x days”
1) i had BSOD’s in XP (when i still ran it). Several. Actually, on some other forum, we had this contest who got the first BSOD. And yes, screenshots were posted within a month. Standard, XP reboots after a critical error which locked the system. Yeah, people don’t see a blue screen then. Since such screenshots can be easily found, your logic is hereby flawed.
2) i also had BSOD’s immediately when i booted from my PC using a HPT370 RAID controller. It’s supported by XP, it used to work, but when i was forced to do a reinstall after my system got FUBAR’ed it DID NOT work anymore. Even not with the official driver installed, even not with a 3rd party driver. It simply didn’t work. Windows techies couldn’t help me, they advised me among other solutions to ”upgrade my HPT370 BIOS” which is common bullshit since it WAS supported and is supported by GNU/Linux and BeOS, among others. I’m not sure wether this counts as a BSOD, it does count as argument for crappy software if you ask me. I had such problems (different installs) since 95. I had it with 98 too, but it was less worse then.
3) Several MS apps have memory leaks, including the dreaded MSIE. It also has remote exploitable bugs 31 last count, including broken SSL support which it has had for several quarters. Originally it was fixed somewhere near 5.5, but later around 6.0 it was reinvented somehow (how secure, ain’t it?). Since many MS apps use MSIE (Outlook, WMP) these are broken too – leaving aside their own problems which are easy to imagine.
“Can it install itself in a dual-boot system, or will it automaticly opt to overwrite my MBR without prompting me?”
By definition, a Windows install erases MBR.
They put some information about similar tasks in that area. Also the new drop down navigation menu folder things too are there too. I guess you’d have to use it to understand it totally. For my tastes, I’d rather not have that info. Johnny User probably doesn’t care but no one on here is Johnny User (I’m assumming) and of course we like to bitch too. You can always go back to Windows Classic (2k) and XP Classic (haha like I’d want that). You can minimize the sidebar too. You can still do classic start menu as well (2k). So after all said and down you can get it to look like Windows 2000. Not much has changed really but its alpha software so I wasn’t expecting much.
While a “hello world” program could be ported no problem (even by yourself), that does not mean it has to be. They have a mature application (explorer), there is no point in rewriting it. Perhaps your metholodogy of choice enjoys tinkering with perfectly acceptable code (instead of just fixing bugs)?
And yes managed programs can leak memory while they are running (which for explorer.exe will be _always_).
HPT370 RAID controller installation — known problem for win2000 and winxp. Special instructions are in the HPT370’s readme.txt file.
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/370drivers_down.htm
See also:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q225125
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q220845
>>>Several MS apps have memory leaks, including the dreaded MSIE. It also has remote exploitable bugs 31 last count
The Pivx list is outdated beyond repair, not even Pivx themselves are posting it anymore. Even before Pivx took the list down, only a handful (i.e. about 5) out of the 30 vulnerabilities were for the latest IE6 SP1 version.
“Do you know how hard it is to build or rebuild a application that large, how many developers work on such projects and how many lines of code it takes?”
It’s not like they haven’t done it before. They had to do the same when going from Windows 3.x to NT/9x. Why do you think they’re taking so long to develop the OS? It’s a major release with a lot of added functionality. It borders on being a total rewrite (with the changes to the kernel, managed APIs, new renderer, networking improvements, WinFS, NGSCB, etc., and the need to create managed subsystems to run legacy code, it’s a rewrite in many ways, but more complex in others). The Longhorn APIs are all managed code. For the apps to best take advantage of the new functionality, they’ll need to be managed as well. Why would they waste time creating managed APIs (WinFS, WinFX, Avalon, Indigo, Managed DirectX, etc.) if they aren’t going to take advantage of those APIs in the shell and included apps? As you can see in the article, Outlook Express, even at this early stage, already requires WinFS. This trend will continue.
During the “Longhorn Wave”, MS’ major apps, like Office 12 for example, are going to be fully managed or managed/unmanaged hybrids that will eventually be fully managed. As time goes on, with each new release, MS also plans to push managed code further down into the OS. They’re doing this because not only does it make the OS more easily portable, it also makes it easier to code against and makes it more secure.
“(even by yourself)”
Ouch!
“They have a mature application (explorer), there is no point in rewriting it. Perhaps your metholodogy of choice enjoys tinkering with perfectly acceptable code (instead of just fixing bugs)?”
The idea is to try to fix a pre-existing poor implementation with newer technology. I do like to keep things simple (those killer hello world apps really take a lot out of me
but sometimes reworking a mature but bad implementation is a good idea.
Tried it, didn’t work. I actually remember that site. It shouldn’t be even necessary to go to that site, because, as you have already read: it worked in the past, on the very same OS, without ever been on that site. Why should i go to it after i installed the same OS with the same driver when it worked flawless before?
I don’t see a reason stated by PivX why they changed from open disclosure to closed disclosure.
“only a handful (i.e. about 5) out of the 30 vulnerabilities were for the latest IE6 SP1 version.”
Can you proof this?
Do you claim MSIE doesn’t have a broken SSL implementation? Can you explain why it has been broken for so long?
Do you find it normal critical vulnerabilities which are known remain unfixed for months?
>>>Do you claim MSIE doesn’t have a broken SSL implementation?
I didn’t claim anything about SSL — I simply don’t know the subject at all.
>>>”only a handful (i.e. about 5) out of the 30 vulnerabilities were for the latest IE6 SP1 version.”
<<<Can you proof this?
http://lists.netsys.com/pipermail/full-disclosure/2003-September/00…
If you read Pivx’s listing carefully, most of the 30 vulnerabilities listed are for older and unpatched versions of IE.
Look at the link above, Pivx added 7 vulnerabilities to its listing in Sept 2003. Even Pivx acknowledged that most of the 7 vulnerabilities that Liu had found have been patched long time ago by Microsoft.
But does that prevent Pivx from listing ALL 7 vulnerabilities to their listing — hell no. A google-cached version of the Pivx listing clearly show that Pivx just added ALL 7 vulnerabilities into its listing:
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:QjBWDWyaNXQJ:217.234.29.61/unc…
If you read the list carefully, only about 5 of the vulnerabilities are specific to IE6 SP1.
>>>Tried it, didn’t work. I actually remember that site. It shouldn’t be even necessary to go to that site, because, as you have already read: it worked in the past, on the very same OS, without ever been on that site. Why should i go to it after i installed the same OS with the same driver when it worked flawless before?
Because somehow, thru luck, you managed to successfully install in the past. The issue is in the installation itself. You are comdemning the whole OS when there is nothing wrong with the OS itself, the hardware itself and the driver itself.
and it works fine in windows, 99% of all problems are the user.
“It is very difficult to draw any conclusions at this early stage. With the final release being years ahead of us, there is not really anything sane to say about where Microsoft is heading. All I can do is try to give an objective judgment of where this ‘version’ of Windows stands, compared to its predecessors. ”
Absolutly! Comparing Windows Longhorn 4051 to the final RTM product is like comparing Windows Chicago 58s to Windows 95 biuld 950. Completly different. ONly the very rough apperance and performance of the end result is now just coming to light. Or, if you have never used the Chicago biulds, compare Windows 95 biuld 950 to Windows XP biuld 2600.xpsp2.030618-0119. Drasically different, and about the only common thing is Explorer is the shell, it uses a standard DOS file archey, and it runs 32 bit apps. Not much else in common.
This would be like comparing LH 4051 to the final RTM product, or predicting that man will be able to extract hydrogen directly out of water, and inject it into the cylenter directly to combust in a vehicle so you only have to fill your gastank with water that can be freely gotten by the year 2010. Propably wont happen by then given our current rate of progress with hydrogen powered vehicles, but it may happen by 2200. The point is, We do not know how long it will take to get to this dream system where fuel is literally as free as water, (because it would be water), as we are only now beginning the research into hydrogen as a reliable fuel source.
“Because somehow, thru luck, you managed to successfully install in the past. The issue is in the installation itself. You are comdemning the whole OS when there is nothing wrong with the OS itself, the hardware itself and the driver itself.”
Where do i comdemn the whole OS because of this driver issue? I don’t. However it worked out of the box after an install while it didn’t after a reinstall. The installation procedure was exactly the same. I’m not gonna repeat futher what i said either.
Oh, and it’s not a HPT ”card”; it’s an on-board RAID controller. Baai.
“I didn’t claim anything about SSL — I simply don’t know the subject at all.”
The information is stated in the 2nd URL you provide:
“IE https certificate attack
Description: Undetected SSL man-in-the-middle attacks, decrypting SSL-encrypted traffic in realtime
Published: December 22 2001 ( Stefan Esser )
Published: June 6 2000 ( ACROS )
Reference: http://security.e-matters.de/advisories/012001.html
Example exploit: http://suspekt.org/
Status: Initially fixed in IE4 and early IE5s by MS00-039, re-introduced by a later patch.”
The first URL currently doesn’t work, at least not here. I’ll try it later.
Is this one fixed already: “11 September 2003: Added Media bar ressource injection by jelmer”?
Taking into account that that URL is from september, and that SSL has been broken for approx. 2 years and for example this vulnerability from 11 sept not found by Liu is broken, then how is that a safe browser if these vulns have existed for months and still do?
MSIE is broken, wakeup, use something else. It’s PNG and CSS implemention are broken as well.
What a fucking joke. Utter OSX Panther rippoff…
Although it says quite abit, when the company that holds 95% of market-share, watches what the company that holds 5% of the market does – one could deduct, or assume the 5% company has a superior product. But alas- the mob is fooled by marketing…
Win32 is still supported
wxWindows should still run under Longhorn.
The 3D UI “Aero” is not displayed in this build.
The Side Bar can be made to be fully transparent if you like. It can also be a news aggregator (RSS feeds) which is nice if you read blogs.
WinFS is a major undertaking in so much that you are breaking the physical data structure from the logical data structure and allowing the user to look at their files (any file, jpg, gif, doc, pdf, txt, html etc.) based on the logic they choose at the moment. No file hierarchies to create any more, no need for multiple copies of files in multiple directories.
“Avalon” the UI will allow developers and ultimately windows itself to take advantage of Photoshop, Illustrator, or even Afteraffects files without “flattening” them. This means you graphics designers can do their thing and developers will be able to “plug-in” the design as is.
The communication stack “Indigo” is a fully XML leveraged means of communicating with the outside world. Regardless of OS etc. So if your apps speak XML will be able to wire up to a Windows GUI and leverage both WinFS and Avalong.
Security is handled in multiple ways within the code and OS. All the interfaces to the OS are in managed code,which means your magic buffer overruns will no longer affect a windows Longhorn machine. Secondly as a developer you be able to leverage the resources of the machine however unlike ActiveX you will not automatically be able to over write reg keys or even write to the registry in Longhorn. So to write a virus which tries to take advantage of WinFS will be difficult at best.
The question no one has asked yet is, will Longhorn be 64 bit? It still looks like they are building a 32 bit OS…
Q
>>>Status: Initially fixed in IE4 and early IE5s by MS00-039, re-introduced by a later patch.”
>>>Taking into account that that URL is from september, and that SSL has been broken for approx. 2 years (2000-2001)
This is my entire argument — Pivx never went back to their listing of 30 vulnerabilities and tested the latest IE6 SP1 against these vulnerabilities.
The SSL vulnerability was patched in Sept 2002, but it still showed up in Pivx’s listing long after.
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020466,2121985…
The security listing is always just a “moment in time”.
Quote from BOFH
“– WinFS, for example, a real strain on your system’s resources —
WinFS is only a high-resource application if you run it with default parameters. 4051 (and all other leaked builds) are designed to be run on Dual Xeon workstations with over 2Gb of RAM, at MS HQ. If you want to run it on a little P4 2Ghz with 256mb, then you need to reconfigure WinFS in order to reduce the resource usage. This allows you to keep all the functionality, but with less back-caching of the DB in active memory. ”
How do you tweak WINFS, I cant find any info on this. Any help would be appreciated.
It’s obvious judging by the screenshots that they haven’t yet done anything significant with the icons & such. One would expect that they wouldn’t/shouldn’t overlook the use of SVG based graphics. Those icons look terrible. Early days, I know.
64-bit builds are being developed alongside the 32-bit build. There are currently builds available for x86, x86-64, and Itanium.
“What is my job at work? Seriously. I fix XP machines all day long. Hmmm. I’ve never had to fix my Mac OS X machines…
Not trolling. Just the facts.”
When I was a tech for HP, I would run into NT techs and we would talk about Apple and the powermacs. Our customers would flip because we were talking so positive about Apple.
Yup after working on Windows crap, it’s nice to come home and be on a Macintosh. And I have a 3 yr old G3 and leave the thing on for weeks at a time. No problems with it. Keep up the good work Apple!
Also, 64-bit .Net runtimes will be available from the next version of .NET (Whidbey) on (Longhorn’s version is Codename: Orcas), allowing current and future managed apps to take advantage of 64-bit CPUs.
Run a search on ieXbeta for “LeakFix 0.6”, which I created. It has a button specially for fixing WinFS, which kills and re-starts the appropriate services with the correct parameters.
Also, whoever said that “Aero” will be 3D is full of shit; I already discounted that rumour over 6 months ago. The only way in which Aero will be 3D is in the way OS X is with shadows giving a perception of depth to the screen. It’s NOT going to have any kind of “3D Interface”.
Is it just me, or is longhorn a poor man’s OS X? I’m not intentionally trying to troll but come on now. Metal title bars, Transparancy in Windows titles and their “Sidebar” dock thingy. A common Contact database? Hello Address book. Win FS, a poor design decision compared to b-tree+, after all a relation is indexed and searched on as a b-tree, right? XAML, hello Mozilla’s XUL.
Please, help me to see even one innovative idea? in 2007 Microsoft will be releasing 2002 technology. Are they really that far behind? MSFT needs a new Technology leader, Bill Gates got to go.
“The only way in which Aero will be 3D is in the way OS X is with shadows giving a perception of depth to the screen. It’s NOT going to have any kind of “3D Interface”.”
That isn’t quite right. It’s actually the other way around. The desktop mimmic the standard 2D paradigm that’s around today, but unlike in OS X, all desktop elements in Longhorn are 3D surfaces rendered with the GPU. There is actual depth between objects, not just the appearance of it. You can also mix animation and video with desktop elements manipulate it in actual 3D space. So, while your desktop won’t look like a Quake map, it’ll still be actual 3D.
As a skinning and themeing supporter, I’m just wondering what the skin/theme community can do with this… It’s definitely going to be cool, at least, that’s what I’m hoping for…
Not quite, n4cer. Each window is rendered on a DirectX .NET (milrender) texture, and the desktop itself is made up of a composite of each of these textures, in much the same way (as I said earlier) OS X is. Keith Packard’s XServer uses the same approach, with the X Compositor extension. Doesn’t make it 3D.
“ugly like my grandmother’s couch.”
Very funny.
…and true.
The slate vs. metal vs brushed metal posts are getting silly. The point is if OSX was red with yellow dots, so would this Windows beta be. That’s the point. MS just copies and puts their own name on it.
Longhorn’s DCE uses Direct3D for all rendering and composition. The desktop can have an attached depth buffer for 3D. Video, animation, text, and drawing is processed and output using Direct3D. Shaders can be used with either of those elements, and are used for ClearType 2.0, as well as shadowing and other effects.
Mac OS X does not accelerate rendering. The GPU is only used for compositing. If Xr is similar to OS X, I imagine it has the same shortcoming, but I will reserve judgement until I can check it out further. Also, OS X uses a shared bitmap that applications draw into which is then composited. Longhorn uses seperate surfaces for each window.
The above is for Tier 2. Tier 1 uses the GPU for scaling and (depending on available features) for ClearType text rendering. Drawing is done using software. Tier 0 (compatability mode) is unaccelerated.
Regarding the primary partition issue, this must be a bug in this version. After all, I have XP installed in a logical partition, and had Windows 2000 installed in one before it. So I’ve been working with Windows in a logical partition for over 3 years now. I can’t believe that Longhorn is going to use this ability.