Upgrading Windows Vista or 7RC to Windows 7 on dual boot with Linux (Ubuntu)

2010-02-27T00:00:00-08:00

As you may or may not know, the Windows 7 RC/beta/other releases expire at the latest on March 1st, 2 days from now. So I had to spend some time this weekend upgrading to a full Windows 7. Fortunately, my school offers Windows 7 Professional for free if you’re an engineering student (so we do get special treatment, aw!).

Anyway, if you’re like me, you’re dual booting Windows + Linux, and you have to reinstall Windows, you were probably using GRUB to boot into your OS. Well, as it turns out, reinstalling Windows wipes out GRUB from the boot record. Oh no! What to do?

Fortunately, the solution is simple. I searched for “restore grub” and found this excellent guide.

The summary:

Get a Ubuntu Live CD and boot from it.</li>

Then run these in your terminal:

    sudo -i
 
 # get a list of your partitions in /dev/sdX format
 fdisk -l
 
 # if you can't decide which one is your linux
 # partition (see the System column?)
 df -Th # lists partitions with size and % used
 
 
 # mount your Ubuntu partition, mine was sda4
 mount /dev/sdXY /mnt # 
 
 # install grub on the partition, mine was sda
 grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdX
 
 # be nice and unmount it, to avoid problems
 umount /mnt

Reboot. Done! Your old GRUB shows up now.</li>

So that’s it. Hope this helps you avoid reinstalling Linux, which is really unnecessary :)

Installing OpenGL + GLUT on Kubuntu 9.04

2009-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

I’m taking a Computer Graphics class, and during the first week we need to install OpenGL and write a first, very simple program. I looked around for tutorials and couldn’t find any simple ones, so I’ve compiled one below.

This tutorial should help you install OpenGL + Glut on Debian-based Linux distributions.

My OS: Kubuntu 9.04 i386 (32 bit)

Installing GLUT:

sudo apt-get install freeglut3 glut-doc

In my case, I had to install an nvidia driver as well:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180-dev

For some of you, this might not be the case, and the mesa-common package would work:

sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev

Then (and here’s the part that got me worried), you can try testing a simple example, but I got this error:

OpenGL GLX extension not supported by display ':0.0'

To fix this, it was much simpler than I thought – I just needed to reboot. (If you don’t want to, for some reason, restarting X should work just fine.) If this problem doesn’t go away, I found a couple of resources in my search before rebooting, here and here.

After setting this up, I looked up tutorials, and decided to use this simple example: (found here)

#include &lt;GL/glut.h&gt;

#define window_width  640
#define window_height 480

// Main loop
void main_loop_function()
{
   // Z angle
   static float angle;
   // Clear color (screen)
   // And depth (used internally to block obstructed objects)
   glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
   // Load identity matrix
   glLoadIdentity();
   // Multiply in translation matrix
   glTranslatef(0,0, -10);
   // Multiply in rotation matrix
   glRotatef(angle, 0, 0, 1);
   // Render colored quad
   glBegin(GL_QUADS);
   glColor3ub(255, 000, 000); glVertex2f(-1,  1);
   glColor3ub(000, 255, 000); glVertex2f( 1,  1);
   glColor3ub(000, 000, 255); glVertex2f( 1, -1);
   glColor3ub(255, 255, 000); glVertex2f(-1, -1);
   glEnd();
   // Swap buffers (color buffers, makes previous render visible)
    glutSwapBuffers();
   // Increase angle to rotate
   angle+=0.25;
}

// Initialze OpenGL perspective matrix
void GL_Setup(int width, int height)
{

    glViewport( 0, 0, width, height );
    glMatrixMode( GL_PROJECTION );
    glEnable( GL_DEPTH_TEST );
    gluPerspective( 45, (float)width/height, .1, 100 );
    glMatrixMode( GL_MODELVIEW );
}

// Initialize GLUT and start main loop
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    glutInit(&argc, argv);

    glutInitWindowSize(window_width, window_height);

    glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGB | GLUT_DOUBLE);

    glutCreateWindow("GLUT Example!!!");

    glutIdleFunc(main_loop_function);

    GL_Setup(window_width, window_height);
   glutMainLoop();
}

Thanks! I’m eager to update this tutorial with more information, so if you’re having problems, let me know!

Disembrangling Programming

Upgrading Windows Vista or 7RC to Windows 7 on dual boot with Linux (Ubuntu)

Installing OpenGL + GLUT on Kubuntu 9.04

Additional resources: