Giving Windows 7 Beta a Try

I have been running Ubuntu almost exclusively on my personal PC for over a year now. I have had some issues, most of which I have mentioned on this blog, but the problems I have had running Linux have not been better or worse than the problems I have had with Windows, just different.

I am going to try taking a break from Linux though to give Windows 7 a try. The beta was free for anyone who wanted it and I figure it is about time I try something new from Microsoft. I haven't used Vista except for the occasional web browsing on my wife's laptop. Vista is still foreign to me. Part of my motivation to switch to Linux was in part because of Vista actually. The Vista roll out was a disaster. When it was released there were software compatibility and stability issues, problems with and missing hardware drivers, concerns over intrusive DRM, the super annoying UAC (though you can turn User Access Control off), poor performance (like unzipping files), 4 different versions which was confusing for consumers and it was expensive ($200 - $320 or $100 -$220 to upgrade).

I was wary of performance issues and DRM but the biggest thing for me was it really wasn't worth the money to upgrade. I remember getting the Windows 95 upgrade for my birthday and being so excited about it. That was not the case here. XP is good enough.

Microsoft has learned some things from their expensive Vista release experience though. (Or maybe the press is just nicer to Windows 7.) It looks like they are making Windows 7 what Vista should have been. I do feel a little like I am participating in the Mojave Experiment though by running it. Having this open beta is a good idea. It gets people using the OS and gets more real world usage. It gets buzz like this blog post too. MS also included a "Snipping Tool" that makes taking screen shots of parts of the screen easy. (hint, hint all you beta testers) Getting to run this beta might get me willing to buy my next PC with Windows 7 and dual boot instead of getting a Linux only machine as has been my intention for a while.

So far, I like Windows 7.

What I like:

• I love the resource monitor. I know it showed up in Vista but it is so useful and worth mentioning!
  
• It is much prettier (though much of the changes came with Vista). It is about time Windows supports themes natively.
  
• Speedy. This is a fresh install though.
  
• Restart your computer after updates notification lets me say 10 min, 1 hour or 4 hours. That has always annoyed me to the point of not installing updates. Still, I shouldn't have to restart that often.
  
• It has been stable.
• Pretty backgrounds that can rotate too!
• Calculator got much love feature wise.
  

What I dislike:

• UAC notifications are annoying! They are even more annoying when controlling the computer with Synergy (shared mouse/keyboard application) because it disables control to the machine from everything but the physical mouse/keyboard.
• Windows Media Player is confusing. I've never much liked Windows Media Player since about version 9 or 10. The eye candy of the interface makes it hard to use.
• Still no concept of virtual desktops! Copy that feature please. Feel free to disable it by default. I will not complain that you are copying wherever that came from first.
  

Undecided:

• I don't know if I like the new task bar. I am having trouble getting used to not being able to minimize and maximize single windows by clicking on them (only if there is a group, still works with just 1) though in theory I shouldn't need to do that with the full window preview ("peek" is what they call it). This is the biggest change by far. It is a lot like the dock on OS X (though I don't use a Mac enough to be confident with that comparison). I never have like the group windows in previous versions (and always disable it) so this will get some getting used to.
• What is so special about IE 8?
• My first encounter with the Ribbon in paint.

I am sure there are tons of other features I will like that I just haven't encountered yet. I have not read much about the OS either so I don't know what features to investigate. This is all just my first experience stuff.

Windows 7 "Peek" Feature

Resource Monitor in Windows 7

Wine development release 1.1.9 is now available

The Wine development release 1.1.9 is now available.

What's new in this release:
- A large number of regression test fixes.
- Performance improvements in memory management.
- Improved POP3 support in inetcomm.
- Initial implementation of the XInput DLL.
- Various bug fixes.

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

http://www.winehq.org/site/download

Free CrossOver for Linux and Mac TODAY ONLY!

CodeWeavers is offering free copies of CrossOver for Linux and Mac users for today, October 28th only! They are doing this as part of a Lame Duck Challenge Free Offer. CrossOver is based on Wine which allows you to run Windows applications on Linux and Mac platforms by implementing the Windows API on those platforms.

As of writing this, their website is in slim mode because of all the traffic but they are still accepting email address submissions and providing downloads for their Pro and Games versions of CrossOver. Go download it now if you are a Linux or Mac user. What do you have to lose?

Linux in the real world - in the wild

We all know that computers are everywhere in todays world. They are ATM machines, in your car, kiosks, cash registers, running factories, your cell phone, and the list could go on forever. You may not have thought about it but even these computers need an operating system. Many scarily run Windows, others run an embedded OS like QNX, VxWorks, or even plain old DOS. Most though, without you knowing it, probably run Linux. Embdedded Linux market share is high and on the rise.

I got to thinking about this again recently thanks to a Digg post: Vatican Runs Linux Yes, apparently they run Linux behind the scenes for some TVs in the gift shop. I wonder where else the Vatican is using Linux. This also makes me want to know where else have you seen or known Linux to be running? If it is embedded, you likely don't know that you have seen a device running Linux but maybe you've seen a Linux desktop somewhere like your local library, school, or in my case a hotel in Berlin.

Some companies are open about their products running Linux (and generally they have to be thanks to the GPL). Sometimes hackers just make Linux run on the device. Here are some:

• Linksys WRT54G Router
• Garmin Nuvi 8xx and Nuvi 5xxx-series GPS
• Many, many smartphones
• and all sorts of other devices
  

Despite the high Linux usage, Windows is easier to spot in the wild though. Let me show you some proof:

At the McDonald's drive through

At the ATM

In Vegas

Piccadilly Circus in London

At the Gas Station

At the airport

Times Square in NYC and here too

Then there is the impressive showing at Toronto's The Bay department store. I could show you examples, after examples, after examples, after examples, after examples. So it is good to not "see" Linux running like this.

So back to my original question. Where do you know of Linux running in the wild? Do you have any pictures?

cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.

I am trying to mount a Windows share on a a 2003 server machine with an old Fedora Core 1 box. Mounting the same share using the same command on Ubuntu 8.04 worked (Samba 3.0.28a) but not on Fedora (Samba 3.0.7-2.FC1). The Fedora box also was able to mount a share on Windows XP without any problems. The error I kept getting was cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.

Looking around some I found that this is due to a security policy in Windows 2003 Server that forces the connections to be encrypted. To disable it, on the Win2k3 box go to Administrative Tools -> Domain Controller Security Policy. Then select Local Policies -> Security Options and find the policy Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always). Disable that. (I also had to disable: Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (if client agrees) to keep from getting a Permission denied). You will then you will want to reload the policy with 'gpupdate'.


After that though, I got another error message: tree connect failed: ERRDOS - ERRnosuchshare (You specified an invalid share name) That message means that I am trying to mount a directory inside of the share (which I am, and which works on the newer versions of Samba). This fix for that is to just mount the share and change your path references (or upgrade).

Instead of:
mount -t smbfs -o username=USER,password=PASS //HOST/SHARE/DIR /mnt/DEST/

Use:
mount -t smbfs -o username=USER,password=PASS //HOST/SHARE /mnt/DEST/

and then change your usage to always change to the DIR.

View XPS (XML Paper Specification) files on Linux

A few days ago I was looking at the page for Windows XP SP3 and noticed some documentation at the bottom in a file format I had never heard of before. In addition to a PDF, there was an XPS (XML Paper Specification) available.

XPS is a new competitor to PDF. It was developed by Microsoft and included in Vista and Office 2007 (no wonder I have never heard of it before). They have submitted to the ECMA for standardization but I don't have much hope in them using the ISO Standard stamp as much more than a selling point. Microsoft has not shown they intend to play nice with standards. Remember their HTML extensions and ActiveX? And the latest crap with OOXML? They like to "Embrace, extend and extinguish"

Either way, if you are running Linux and need to view one of these files, I've only found one program so far that does it. The Gnome viewer Evince doesn't yet but the KDE4 viewer Okular does. To install it on Ubuntu just use Synaptic. There is a lot to install since you have to have the KDE base libraries but other than that it is fairly simple.

Can Vista unzip files any slower?

While preparing to run the scanning software for the Open Source Census on my wife's Vista laptop, I realized another reason why I am switching to Linux instead of the next Microsoft OS: Extracting zip files is ridiculously slow!


When extracting the 43 MB archive that contains just over 14,700 items and about 100 MB of data, Vista took an eternity in comparison. Extracting this file on my old slow laptop (Pentium M, 1.4 GHz) running Ubuntu 8.04 took 35 seconds, on a slow old (6 years old, Pentium 4, 1.4 GHz) XP desktop extracting this file took about 2 minutes, on the newest computer in the house (less than a year old, Core 2 Duo 1.5 GHz), it took well over 20 minutes!! That is Vista for you.


This is the release version of Vista and not service pack 1 so maybe the problem has been fixed. That is no excuse for something this slow though in a release product. Vista is over 10 times slower than XP and 34 times slower than Ubuntu 8.04 for this particular file. Did no one test extracting files before releasing Vista? Surely they would have noticed how slow it was.

I am not alone in noticing this either.

• Vista Zip Slow and Broken?
• Unzip (Extract All) Zip Files in Vista is Painfully Slow - Workaround
• Extracting a file in Vista is surprisingly slow
• Microsoft Vista archive bug?
  
• Is Vista Slow at Decompressing ZIP Files or is it Just Me?
  
• Another Vista wtf
  

Does Vista SP1 fix this problem? I am a little too scared to install it to find out. Some are happy with SP1. This guy still has the problem and so does this guy who upgraded to SP1. The real solution (though I have not tried it yet) seems to be install a new application to handle your archive files like WinRAR or 7-Zip. Remember when we had to do that on Windows 98 and earlier? Moving back to move forward should be the new Microsoft motto.

Ubuntu update manager is better than Windows update manager

Updating your operating system these days is just a fact of life. There are always bugs to fix, security holes to patch and little new features (and sometimes big features, think XP SP2) to push down to users. Both Windows and Ubuntu have update mechanisms in place so users don't have to periodically check and install updates manually. I think if automatic updates didn't exist, most users would never update their systems.

Before Windows had good updates they also had the Code Red worm that affected IIS in July 2001 and Linux had the OpenSSL Slapper worm in September 2002. My home Linux web server got hit by Slapper. The system did have an update feature (the Red Hat Network!) but it was not setup to be automatic. I am not sure why I even had SSL running and open to the world since I didn't use it but that is another story. (If you want to know a little more history about major computer viruses and worms, this Wikipedia page is interesting and helpful: Timeline of notable computer viruses and worms.)

Back to my point - Ubuntu's update manager works well and is not annoying but Windows update makes me want to punch a hole in the wall. I have both Ubuntu and Windows configured to check for updates periodically. Windows checks on whatever schedule Microsoft decided was good and my Ubuntu boxes check daily as I decided was good. I have both configured to go ahead and download updates and let me know when they are ready to be applied.

Ubuntu Update Manager Notification

I don't remember the default behavior of Windows update but I know a lot of people have it setup to install updates automatically. Ubuntu will allow this too and I don't remember its default setting either. Installing the updates automatically sounds great for the novice but I always want to see what is getting updated before I apply any patches to my system. That way if something goes wrong after the updates, I will have an idea what updates caused it and where to start to fix it.

Now we get to the real annoying part. Most of the time Windows updates require a system restart! Why? The only time Ubuntu has ever wanted to restart after installing updates was when a new kernel was installed. What is worse is if you have Windows update configured to automatically install updates it will also automatically restart your system! I don't know about you but I leave a ton of applications up and running all the time. I don't want to come to my computer in the morning and find it freshly restarted with all my applications closed and data lost.

If Windows is configured like mine to ask you to install updates, it will add a little yellow shield in the system tray and occasionally give you a pop up. This is the same way users are notified about updates on Ubuntu.

Windows Updates Notification

But after installing the updates the dreaded "Restart Now" dialog kicks in. I feel like this dialog comes up every 15 minutes or so! It is so annoying. And what is worse is I have occasionally accidentally clicked on "Restart Now" instead of the "Restart Later" button when attempting to keep working instead of being interrupted by this annoying dialog.

NO! I do NOT want to restart now Windows!

If Ubuntu needs to restart, it kindly adds an icon to the system tray. There are no pop ups every 15 minutes that are all to easy to click the wrong button causing your system to just restart right then and there. Windows doesn't even care about anything you may be working on that is unsaved. If you say "Restart Now" it will just start killing applications. Ubuntu updates will occasionally also have a little light bulb letting me know I need to restart some program for the updates to take effect ("some program" has always been Firefox so far). Again, they let me know but they don't annoy me or allow me to screw up something by trying to ignore a dialog.

Ubuntu Restart Required (image thanks to HowtoForge)

To get around the hated "Restart Now" dialog in Windows, I just wait to update when I am about to restart for some other reason. This means updates on my system take longer before they get installed making my system more insecure. It is also getting me in a bad habit and I find that I don't always update Linux when I see that there are new updates.

One final point. Ubuntu also has a great advantage of being able to update your applications as well as the operating system. In Windows, updates don't exist for all those 3rd party applications you installed. You have to manually go out and download an update for each an every program. That assumes you know there are security or bug fix updates to be installed. With Ubuntu, update manager knows about all your applications and updates them along with the OS. Nice!

Digg: 50 Proprietary Programs We All Hate--and the OS Alternatives

It's not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it's a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it's the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keep the user experience confined to... well, being the user. Here are 50 commonly used programs that have open source alternatives.

read more | digg story

I pointed out many of the same applications in an earlier post: Cross Platform Applications That Make the Switch from Windows to Linux Easier

SkiFree Rules! Thanks For The Nostalgic Times Wine!

I was working on setting up Samba tonight so my wife could access content from my system (more on that later) and I stumbled across a little application shared in My Documents on her system (my old one). It was none other than SkiFree!!!!!

SkiFree was released way back in 1991 as part of the Windows Entertainment Pack. I don't even remember what ele was included in that because SkiFree was by far the BEST of the games. I think I have a floppy disk around here somewhere with the entertainment pack on it. Of course, finding a floppy drive to read the disk would take some work.

Anyway, SkiFree was released in the Windows 3.0 days. Windows 3.1 would not be released until early 1992. I remember playing this on the only Windows 3.0 system I ever used in my 8th grade yearbook class when I wasn't stuck laying out pages in PageMaker (3.1 had been released by this time but that was the only install of Windows 3.0 I ever saw/used).

I have also been playing with Wine (Wine Is Not and Emulator) a bit more lately too. (Yes, that is a recursive acronym just like GNU, bunch of nerds!) When I discovered ski.exe, I figured why not give it a go. And boy did it go. It turns out, SkiFree is a platinum rated application running on Wine. That is as good as it gets. I also found out that my old crappy SkiFree 1.0 is only compiled for 16bit Windows and the author fixed some bugs and recompiled it for 32bit systems in October 2005. Sweet!


So thank you Wine team for implmenting all those API calls from Windows 3.0 so that SkiFree could run. And for all of you out there who want to play it yourself, it is freeware now! Go download SkiFree from the author's site and read up on some history of the application and his licensing it to Microsoft for 100 shares of stock (I hope he hung on to them for a while).

Cross Platform Applications That Make the Switch from Windows to Linux Easier

I'll admit that switching from Windows to Linux is not always a painless process. Years of learning the ins and outs of Windows doesn't always transfer to Linux. Fortunately when it comes to the applications you use, the process can become a little easier.

There are numerous cross platform applications that allow you to run the same exact application you may run under Linux in Windows. If you are already comfortable with an application in Windows before switching to Linux, that removes one hurdle for you.

Best of all, most if not all, of these applications are a free download away. Not all of them are Open Source though which I would argue is also a promising thing (not for Free Software advocates though) because it shows commercial support for Linux.

Some of my favorite applications that I have used or use regularly are listed below:

• Firefox - My primary web browser for the last 5 years. Take back the web!
  
• Pidgn - (Formerly Gaim) This is one wonderful all in one IM client. It supports all of these protocols: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo! and Zephyr. I started using this as my only IM client the minute I had to log into AIM and Yahoo! at the same time. I haven't looked back.
  
• OpenOffice - A great open source office suite. Stop spending so much money on MS Word and just download the hefty 120-140MB installer. OO also helped lead the charge for the new Open Document Format (ODF) which will allow office documents to work for anyone, not just those paying the Microsoft Tax. I imagine I will blog more on ODF sooner or later since it and the OOXML specification are still battling it out.
  
• Thunderbird - A good email client brought to you from the same people who brought you Firefox. I have to be honest and say it is not my favorite email client but it is still solid. Once you get to Linux you might want to try Evolution which is more Outlook like (and may have a Win32 version too!).
  
• Filezilla - A decent and full featured GUI FTP client. I don't like the latest UI updates that are part of version 3.0 but you get used to stuff like that. It does what you need without the need for a command line.
  
• Gimp - The "Photoshop Killer" it is not but still a great replacement for many. I am working on learning it since I do use Photoshop quite a bit.
  
• Azureus - My old favorite Bittorrent client. It is super feature rich. It is also a resource hog in my opinion. I've opted for uTorrent on Windows and Deluge in Linux. All 3 are similar though. Maybe now that I have more RAM I will give it a go again.
  
• Google Desktop - Yep, Google ported their desktop search tool to Linux. There are other Linux specific desktop search applications but that is not the point of this post.
  
• Wireshark - (formerly Ethereal) An awesome packet sniffer. You may never need this but when you do, it is there for you on both OSes.
  
• Google Earth - This is just fun to play with! Especially for a Geocacher like me.
  
• Picasa - Great photo management application. And to get it working, they made changes to Wine that were given back the the community. Open Source at its finest.
• Abiword - A word processor that handles MS Word documents well and is lightweight and fast.
  
• TightVNC - Remote desktop access. I use this mostly on Windows.
  
• Eclipse - The new heavyweight (in a good and bad way) of IDEs. It is designed to be an IDE for any and everything you can imagine thanks to a plug-in architecture.
• Second Life - An online 3d virtual world game. I don't use it much but it is fun that it works.
  

And others I am less familiar with like:

• Opera - Another web good browser. I only use it sporadically now. Back in the day when I had a 486 I ran it because all the other browsers were so slow. I mostly use it on my Wii these days.
  
• VLC - Good all purpose media player. I used it to watch DVDs in Linux and haven't used the Windows version before.
  
• Audacity - Sound recording and editing software.
  
• Inkscape - Scalable Vector Grapics (SVG) editor like Illustrator or Corel Draw.
  
• Password Gorilla - Password Manager
  
• RSS Owl - RSS Feed Reader
  
• Nvu - Web authoring like DreamWeaver or FrontPage
  
• Xchat - IRC chat program
  
• Mame - Play old video games with this emulator. I've only used the Windows version of this and that was many years ago.
  
• POPFile - Filter out all that annoying SPAM and sort other types of email too! I've run this in Windows for years but never Linux. It is written in Perl so I know it will run in Linux.
  

Also, as web applications are growing in use, all you need is a browser in any OS for many applications. Webmail, Google Docs, Bloglines, online calendars, etc all look and work the same (mostly!) on any compatible browser regardless of operating system. My eventual switch to Linux, among other advantages, is why I made the switch from POP email to a webmail provider.

There are of course other cross platform applications like Apache, Tomcat and MySQL but Linux is and has been rock solid as a server for a long time so I'm not really thinking about those applications. Just sticking to the desktop here.

What applications did I miss that you use? I know there are more. I thought of a few new ones just from proof reading this post.

Downloading Pictures From My Camera Changes The Dates!

I've been loving my Linux experience so far. Sometimes things just work the way or better than you expect. Sometimes, like today, they don't.

Today I got home from spending time with the family for Christmas and decided instead of booting into Windows to copy my digital photos off my camera, I would use Linux. I was very confident it would work because the camera shows up as a generic mass storage device which I know is well supported by Linux. My 500GB external hard drive shows up this way and it works flawlessly.

I plugged in the camera and up popped a "Photo Import" dialog. Sweet!

As in Windows, I decided to import my images manually though so I clicked ignore. I have a system for this, ok! I also was not sure what the whole import would do. Turning on the camera had added a "disk" icon to my desktop so I just browsed there, created my local folder on the NTFS partition where all the other images are, and then moved them over. Now I wish I would have just copied them.

After moving all the files, I wanted to sort them by the date they were taken. In Windows, that is the same date as the file. But oh no, not in Linux. The move operation had changed the modified date (the files was NOT modified, just moved) so they were all times of just a few minutes ago. Gnome will show you the picture taken date that is embedded in the EXIF data but only on a per image basis so there is no sorting to be had. Good thing the file names are sequential. I still would like to have the file dates the same as the date they were taken.

I did a little searching and found I am not alone in wanting to sort by date the picture was taken in Gnome. We are both without an answer though. Someone suggested F-Spot which is a photo collection application that comes pre-installed in Ubuntu. I might try that out sometime soon to see if it can rename the files for me. There has to be a utility or script to change the file modified date to the picture taken date somewhere!!!

UPDATE 3/7/08: After some more research I discovered this problem is limited to NTFS and there is a fix thanks to Ubuntu Backports.

Dual Boot Into Windows And Ubuntu With GRUB

Dual booting in Linux is pretty easy. All you have to do is install Linux on a separate partition (after installing Windows or there is more work involved since Windows always overwrites your MBR) and setup the GRUB boot manager. Creating a separate partition is also fairly easy with GParted. GParted is part of the Ubuntu Live CD applications. I am not going to get into the details of resizing partitions today though.

In addition to resizing partitions, GParted also is a handy utility to find out what partitions each OS is installed on. Knowing what partition each OS is installed on is necessary to configure GRUB. The image below is from my home desktop:

GParted is not installed by default so you have to add it from Add/Remove programs if you want to use it. Alternatively you can just use fdisk to find out how each partition is configured.

forrest@desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x41ab2316

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           8       64228+   6  FAT16
/dev/sda2   *           9       15756   126495810    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           18996       19452     3670852+  db  CP/M / CTOS / ...
/dev/sda4           15757       18995    26017267+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           15757       18799    24442866   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           18800       18995     1574338+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Earlier this week I commented about some new Ubuntu updates, including a Kernel update. I'm a bit disappointed because the the update wiped out my GRUB configuration, removing my ability to boot into Windows (I still need it sometimes). That is the basis for this post.

So at this point we know from above that Windows is installed on /dev/sda2 and Linux is installed on /dev/sda5. To add the ability to boot into Windows back, you will need to edit your GRUB menu file. From a command line run (gksu is the graphical version of sudo):

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst &

The file has a lot of options but the ones you are looking for are the ones that have title and root options. My currently configured kernel has this entry in menu.lst:

title  Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root  (hd0,4)
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=2a7aa925-61b3-4890-ab99-baa68b29c76c ro quiet splash
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic

Notice the hd0 part of the root option. That corresponds to the device we want to boot from. The 4 is the partition on that device. In this case, Linux is installed on the first disk and the fifth partition. Since GRUB starts from 0 instead of 1, the first hard disk is hd0 and the first partition is 0. All of the details of finding the correct name of your partition are here in the GRUB manual, including some slight differences when dealing with extended partitions.

Looking ad the output from fdisk or what is show in GParted, we can see that Windows is installed on the second parition so all we have to do to add Windows to the list is add the following to the GRUB menu.lst:

title  Windows XP
root  (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Windows boots a little differently from other OSes. It has to be chain-loaded. That is the reason for the makeactive and chainloader options.

Another example

I also had to do the same thing on my laptop. I think when I initially installed Ubuntu on my laptop it automatically added Windows to the GRUB configuration. Updates have since wiped that out. Here are my partitions on the laptop via GParted and then fdisk:

forrest@laptop:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa0000000

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           4       32098+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *           5        2567    20587297+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            2568        4676    16940542+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4            4677        4864     1510110    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            4677        4864     1510078+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

And based on that, my GRUB menu.lst entries for my Windows partition and Linux kernel:

title  Windows XP
root  (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title  Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root  (hd0,2)
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=b4741939-10d8-4a31-bfd1-55231e49ebb6 ro splash quiet
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet

I hope those examples help to get your dual boot back up and running. While I am here I also wanted to mention a few other GRUB options that I've taken advantage of. I think all of them are already in the default menu.lst file, just commented out with a #.

• default - set which OS you want to boot into by default
  
• timeout - how long to wait for a user selection before booting into the default OS
  
• color - make your default menus fit a tad more to your taste
• hidemenu - disable the OS selection menu, I prefer to NOT use this option
  

## default num
# Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and
# the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used.
#
# You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use 'savedefault' or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default  1

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout  6

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
# hiddenmenu

# Pretty colours
color cyan/blue white/blue

One final note on GRUB background images with "splashimage"

And one final, final comment. Thinking about the color configuration reminded me of booting into Fedora or RHEL. They have a nice graphical background as part of the GRUB boot screen. I looked into that months back and that is a feature that is not part of the vanilla GRUB distribution but was added to the Redhat stream of GRUB as far back as Redhat 8 (September 2002). This feature is not included in the Debain stable branch, what Ubuntu is based on, so you can't add a boot background without installing GRUB from the Debian unstable which does have it. I don't think that is worth it. Many details on splashimage in GRUB are here.