I logged into my Windows 10 Professional (1703) desktop from home yesterday, using Remmina on Ubuntu 16.04. I wasn’t surprised when my desktop wallpaper was black, I know it does this to save bandwidth, but when I returned to the office this morning my desktop was still black and, as it is set by the administrator via GPO, could not be changed.

Searching the Internet was not helpful on this occasion; so I have made this quick posts to help others.

It turns out that this is not some weird absence of wallpaper, but rather is a plain black wallpaper image, which has managed to get itself cached. The solution is consequentially simple - find and terminate said cached image.

1. Open File Explorer and navigate to %APPDATA% (you can type that into the top address/location field).
2. In the search box at the top right enter the text “Cache” (see image below).
3. Delete the cached version of the black wallpaper once it is found.
4. Sign out and then sign back in.

On my system the specific file location was:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles\CachedImage_1920_1080_POS4.jpg

Please do comment below if this was helpful, or if you needed to alter these instructions at all.

On entering Currys there was plenty of evidence of the new Windows 8, but I noticed that all the copies were upgrades from Windows 7 or Windows XP.  Currys explained that they do not stock full copies of Windows, only the upgrades, and stated that this was not a Curry’s issue, but that it was a Microsoft policy to only sell full versions of Windows via their website.

So I found myself searching online for “buy windows 8” and ended up on the Microsoft site, but, as with Currys, the only versions available were upgrades.

Starting to feel like I’d entered the Twilight Zone, I searched at BT Business Direct, this seemed to be much more successful and I found 4 choices available, but all the versions were OEM copies which I assumed that I was not legally permitted to install on a VM. It appeared that the only choices were OEM licences or Retail upgrade licences, on the face of it - leaving users like myself unable to legally buy Windows at all.

I thought perhaps that this was a short-term anomaly post-launch, but it seems not. Apparently the OEM version is all things to all people, being both a Retail copy for non-system builders, and an OEM copy for system builders (read more). If this is correct then this means that those 4 choices at BT Business Direct may be okay for me afterall.

And here is the word from Microsoft on the matter: “If you are building a computer for your personal use or installing an additional operating system in a virtual machine, you can now purchase OEM System Builder software using the Personal Use Licence.” After pouring over the text of EULAs, this is actually easy and unequivocal. Well done Microsoft.

Knowing my preference for all-things GNU/Linux and FLOSS, some of you may be wondering why I need Windows at all. The reasons are very few and I don’t use Windows from one month to the next, but I would find it difficult to eradicate completely:

1. Tax return: I know that it can be done under Linux, but I prefer to use TaxCalc.
2. Road Angel: I have found no way of updating my Dad’s Road Angel without Windows.
3. Inforad: Similarly I have found no way of updating my Inforad without Windows.
4. Leappad2: I have found no way of updating my childrens’ Leappad2’s without Windows.

So there we have it, we can now officially buy the OEM version for our VMs.

At least I think so.

So, with a heavy heart I reached for my dog-eared copy of the Internet, to see what this would cost me. I knew I needed Microsoft Office Professional, as Microsoft Access is occasionally needed. I found that a full retail licence from BT Business Direct cost £205 plus VAT, not so bad after all.

I considered buying 12 of these full retail licences, but decided in the end to contact our BT account manager to request a quote. I was informed by BT that the full retail licences could not be used on a server; no explanation was given for this, but I was assured that this was the case.  The result was that the cost would in fact be £288 each, an additional £1000. A rather strange reversal of the usual - the more you buy, the lower the unit price.

As I was going to be installing on a virtual machine, I was also interested in knowing that I would be able to reinstall on a new virtual machine, if for any reason I needed to rebuild. For some reason this seemed far less clear than I would have liked, but ultimately I did receive that assurance; albeit in a way that left me wondering if that would indeed ultimately prove to be the case.

One additional confusion is that 2013 is just out, and so there was a choice of 2010 or 2013, we had been told to buy 2010 or later, in order to work with Business Intelligence, but then I read an article on ZDNet Can Microsoft bring BI to the masses if the Excel 2013 masses can’t get BI?. The upshot seems to be that Microsoft Office Professional 2013 may not be enough - I might need Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013, which as far as I can see is not even listed on BT Business Direct.

I visited the Microsoft page on Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 but this left me none the wiser. Following the link to Licensing Options looked promising, but was not. Following the link to View Licensing Options - seemed to suggest that the only option was a three year Enterprise Agreement, but there was no pricing shown, not even under the “Volume Pricing” heading.

So now I need to re-contact BT to find out if they offer Professional Plus 2013 and try and find out if this is what I need and whether I can in fact reinstall on different hardware.

To seasoned purchasers of proprietary software this might all seem par for the course, or perhaps there is an easier way that I have not yet found? I suspect that the truth is that we are too large a company for buying single licences, but too small a company for an enterprise agreement. Neither fish nor fowl, as the saying goes.

But, for the past 5 years or so, I have not had to think about licensing once. If I need a copy of office, then I download OpenOffice (or more recently LibreOffice); if I need a desktop publishing program, then I download Scribus; a graphics editor, the GIMP; an illustrator, Inkscape. And for each of those programs I can install it for all staff without even a thought about how many licences I might have available.

There is no way out for me, sadly, and I will need to navigate these difficult waters whether I like it or not, but there is a better way and that way is Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

It is commonly said, at least in Microsoft circles, that Linux is free if you do not value your time. But is that really true, given the ease of installing and updating software under Linux?

Today I needed to install a Windows-only budgeting program called Profitplanner on our Windows 2003 server. This process was straightforward enough, just a ZIP download which needed extracting and installing.

Whilst the install worked fine, it warned that I needed to install the Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable package, and gave me a link so to do.

Unfortunately the Download button on the Microsoft website would not work in Internet Explorer 8, forcing me to use Chrome instead.

Having downloaded the executable I then tried to install it, but no good - it needed .NET installed first.

The link provided did not take me to the application download page, but instead took me to the main Microsoft download page, where there were 1042 results for “.NET framework”.

The instruction was to install .NET “2.0/3.0”, which I take to mean either 2.0 or 3.0. Even filtering for Windows Server 2003 R2 results in 78 results - 5 pages - including service packs, updates, patches, SDKs etc. There seems to be know way of filtering the results further, leaving me manually searching for Application entries.

I then realised that I should have checked that I don’t already have it installed already, even though it had told me that I hadn’t. Sure enough I did indeed already have .NET Framework 4 installed. Do I really need to install 2.0 or 3.0 alongside it?

I decided to attempt a fresh installation of the .NET Framework 4, but doing so merely told me what I already knew - that it was already installed. The conclusion had to be that that I needed an older version of .NET than that currently on my system, or perhaps a newer version of Visual J#? I searched for the latter first, but 2.0 does indeed appear to be the newest version.

Going down the tack of installing an older version of .NET, a Google search suggested that 3.5 might include versions 2.0 and 3.0. I would have assumed that 4.0 is just a development of that, but who knows - at this stage it is worth a try. I downloaded and attempted to install, but then realised that I have inadvertently downloaded the web installer, which just kept restarting, possibly our proxy server getting in the way. I search again, this time for the redistributable package, and downloaded that.

I then tried to install J#, but again it insisted on 2.0 of the .NET Framework. Only then did I realise that I had installed the .NET Compact Framework.

Yes this was completely my fault, but mistakes like this are inevitable when using the Microsoft Download Centre, as you are offered a bewildering array of similarly named downloads.

I uninstalled the .NET Compact Framework, and search again, eventually finding the 3.5 redistributable listed at the bottom of the .NET Framework 3.5 web installer page. The 197mb download (there are Linux distributions smaller than that) took a while to download and even longer to install. Eventually it completed successfully.

Installing J# now worked, so clearly 3.5 worked where 4.0 did not. With J# installed I was then able to easily install Profitplanner.

Success at last.

Having gone through the above craziness, it occurred to me that .NET is a supported CrossOver Linux application, and J# is probably easily installed as well… 10 minutes later I had a CrossOver bottle with a working copy of ProfitPlanner.

Perhaps unusually it was actually simpler to install a Windows application under Linux than it was under Windows.

So we took the drive out of the NAS and I used a USB to SATA cable to mount the drive on my Debian Squeeze laptop. All worked just fine, I could browse his music and pictures, but there wasn’t much I could do to recover his 200GB of music and pictures; I hadn’t brought an external USB drive with me (note to self: buy a second cable), and we were unable to share a Windows directory with my laptop, for the simple reason that my laptop did not have samba installed, and his Vodafone 3G broadband was not functioning. Yes, it was one of those days.

Simple enough, we thought, we would just plug the USB to SATA cable into his Windows 7 laptop instead. Unfortunately it seems that, despite working out of the box on Linux, it requires a driver installed under Windows 7. A driver which I did not have with me, and of course our 3G connection was still down at this point; so I could not download it (even if I could track it down).

Fortunately we had a spare SATA desktop PC, with a spare place for a hard drive. He did not wish to use Linux, so installed Windows 7. We then plugged in the SATA drive, enabled it in the BIOS, and rebooted. The drive and its partitions were detected, but not assigned a drive letter. We went into drive management, but the option to assign a drive letter was disabled. Clearly there was something adrift with the drive that was preventing it from being mounted in Windows 7.

What I would then have done was use a Linux live CD to boot onto this SATA PC, mount both drives and simply copy the data across, but time had beaten us - they needed to go to his parents, and we had to leave it at that. He decided to take the drive into work and get one of his technical people to recover his data onto a fresh drive.

What a frustrating few hours, and it would have been trivial to fix on a Linux network, firstly because the drive would have just mounted fine (which it did on my laptop), secondly because I could have trivially created an NFS share (okay unfair - as it wasn’t Windows fault that I didn’t have the samba installed), or thirdly I could just have used dd with ssh to transfer the drive image to another computer on the network.

Working on a Windows network is like having one arm tied behind your back. Working on a Windows network without functioning broadband is like having one arm tied behind your back whilst wearing a blindfold.

I need a beer.

Following my recent post regarding Silverlight, unfortunately I have hit disaster.  When the audio starts, it sounds choppy with a double-echo or reverb.  In short it is unusable.  All other audio works fine, even on the same webpage, but as soon as you try and listen to a Silverlight widget it sounds terrible.

Googling “silverlight rdp choppy” in desperation has not filled me with confidence, there are a number of posts including:

• Has anyone else ran into a problem where if you use a Silverlight app over Remote Desktop and it plays a WMA or MP3 file using MediaElement, the sound is choppy?

It is possible that upgrading to Windows Server 2008 would resolve this issue; although there are issues I believe in connecting to the latest RDP version using rdesktop.

I did find this advice from Microsoft, the Microsoft RDP Client was the only sound card available, but I followed the advice anyway to no avail.

What I simply do not understand is why all other audio works perfectly via RDP, except Silverlight, especially given the fact that Silverlight and RDP are Microsoft products.

Any suggestions gratefully received!

We have to be able to play Silverlight media on our two virtual Windows Server 2003 servers.  This is completely unavoidable, because you first need to authenticate via an Active-X website, so any option of using Moonlight on Linux was impossible.

The problem that we had was that when we clicked on the Play Media button, there were two pop ups stating “This page has an unspecified potential security risk” followed by another stating “A problem was encountered with the media file specified.”

I tried bypassing our proxy server;  I ensured that the Internet Enhanced Security was uninstalled; I tried adding the relevant sites to “Trusted sites”; I tried reducing Trusted Sites to “Low” security; I brought all the critical updates up-to-date.  Nothing seemed to make a difference.

Finally, I decided to review the optional Windows updates, just to see if there was anything related to Silverlight and noticed that there was a major update to .net available “.NET framework 4”. Knowing that Silverlight is a .net technology, I installed it and, after yet another reboot, the pop ups had gone and it was working.

My reason for writing about it is simply this:  I had googled endlessly about this problem, without any success, there was seemingly nothing relevant to this problem.  Hopefully this post will help others.

But you should be using Linux not Windows!  There, couldn’t resist ;)

• Why Linux?.

If you are determined to run Windows, then read on!

Secure your network

A recent study found that an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet without a firewall, lasted just four minutes.

Use a hardware firewall

Various studies concluded that so called Personal Firewall software is flawed in concept. Read more about it on Wikipedia, including some of the criticisms:

• Personal Firewall

The good news is that combined modem, router, network switch and Wireless access point can be purchased for less than £50. Linksys and Draytek have a great reputation, and I personally have had no problems with Netgear. Just try and get a personal recommendation, and ensure that it does have a built-in firewall.

Encrypt your Wireless

Often people don’t bother encrypting their wireless network. I believe this is often based on the incorrect assumption that the worst that will happen is that someone will be able to use your broadband for free. The real reason to encrypt your wireless, is because anyone on your wireless network is inside your network, and can thus browse the file-shares on your computer and potentially exploit your machines. The fact that they have bypassed your firewall is a big advantage to them.

Avoid WEP encryption, which can be cracked, and instead opt for WPA encryption.

Secure your PC

Don’t run as administrator

Most Windows users run either as “administrator” or with an account that has administrator rights. This gives any virus that you run full rights to do whatever they want on your PC. Instead you should run as a limited-user account and only login as administrator when you need to, or use the Run as administrator option.

Read more about this subject:

• http://windows.about.com/od/security/a/why_limited.htm

If you have teenage children, it is a good idea to create user accounts for them and restrict them to limited-user rights.

Keep your PC updated

You must use the Windows updater to keep your PC updated with critical updates. If you are running anything older than Windows XP SP2, then consider upgrading, or better still consider changing to Linux.

• Why Linux?

Install anti-virus software

I would avoid all the free trials that come with a new PC, and I would avoid Norton - which will have devastating effect on your PC. Instead I would have a look at the following:

• AVG Free Edition
• Avast Home Edition
• AntiVir Personal Edition

I have only personally tried AVG, but understand that the others are also good.

Install anti-spyware software

Microsoft Defender is now included in Microsoft Vista, and is available for install for Windows XP and this is a logical choice.

• Microsoft Defender
• Spybot - Search & Destroy
• Ad-Aware

I have personally used all of these programs without issue.

If you have already installed some anti-spyware program, make sure it’s not a rogue:

• Spyware Warrior: Rogue Anti-Spyware

Avoid Internet Explorer

Use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. Only use Internet Explorer for those sites that you trust implicitly.

Be cautious

• Do not open email attachments unless you know the sender and are expecting the attachment
• Do not click on hyperlinks in emails (they’re as dangerous as attachments)
• Do not visit dubious websites
• Never follow links in pop-ups
• Delete any chain e-mails or unwanted messages without forwarding
• Don’t reply to junk emails, nor follow links to remove yourself from their database, often all you are doing is confirming that your email address is valid
• When installing software, read every step thoroughly to ensure that you do not install additional software without realising it

Further Reading

• Why Linux?
• Windows XP - Surviving the first day

• Linux (open source)
• Apple Mac OS X (proprietary)
• BSD (open source)
• More → List of operating systems

It is worth mentioning at this point that Apple Mac OS X is a proprietary closed system, whilst the others are open source.

I recommend Linux - Why Linux?.

Options for Windows Virtualisation

There are several options for Windows virtualisation, including:

• QEMU
• Xen
• VirtualBox
• VMWare Server

QEMU

A true open source virtualisation product, but one that runs slowly, often too slowly to be of use. Fortunately you can optimise QEMU by the installation of one of the following:

• KQEMU
• KVM

The former is not entirely open source, but is your main option if you have a Kernel less than 2.6.20.

XEN

Is not an open source product, but is available free. It is considered to be very quick.

VirtualBox

InnoTek offer two versions of their VirtualBox product:

• Full Product - free for Personal and reasonable Evaluation
• OSE (Open Source Edition) - free but requires compiling from source and comes without Guest Additions and without Headless VRDP. The latter seems unimportant, given that Windows has an RDP server already, but it is the only way of running VirtualBox headlessly AFAIK.

I have tested on Debian with great success and the following are the links I used:

• Build VirtualBox
• Complete Host Networking
• Install SeamlessRDP
• Configure for seamless and headless operation
• Fix for multiple windows
  • http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224212
  • https://www.fontis.com.au/rdesktop
• VirtualBox Manual
• Concurrent Users
  • http://concurrentremotesessions.netfirms.com/
  • http://sala.pri.ee/terminal-server-patch/

VMWare Server

Free but not open source. Requires compiling from source. Excellent reliability, supported product. The author has not tested this product.

Introduction

Coping with Windows applications on Linux is probably the biggest problem that you will face. Your options are:

• Install on Linux
• Use a Linux alternative
• Install under Wine
• Publish to Linux desktop
• Virtualise

Install on Linux

This may be a waste of time, but it’s at least worth checking whether your favourite applications have a Linux version.

Use a Linux alternative

You definitely should investigate open source alternatives, some of the applications currently available under Linux are simply stunning.

• http://www.osalt.com/
• http://linuxappfinder.com/
• http://www.tuxsoftware.com/

The following applications are particularly good:

Office suite

Options:

• OpenOffice - more like Microsoft Office than Microsoft Office 2007
• KOffice - fast but less compatible with Microsoft Office

Benefits:

• OpenOffice comes in for a fair amount of criticism for being slow, but on modern hardware this is simply not a problem
• Openoffice is also criticised for trying too hard to emulate Microsoft Office, but for users used to Microsoft, this is a huge advantage
• Includes built-in PDF support with automatic creation of PDF bookmarks (gorgeous)
• Almost 100% compatible with Microsoft Office
• Already compatible with Office 2007 (which you cannot say for Microsoft Office 2002)
• OpenOffice Drawing has no Office equivalent and is simply superb for flow charts
• OpenOffice is free - and versions are available for Windows and Linux

Currently using Windows? Ease the transition by installing OpenOffice on your existing Windows server. And encourage your users to install it at home!

PIM/Email

Options:

• Evolution
• Kontact
• Thunderbird (email only)

Benefits:

• Both Evolution and Kontact have their proponents and their detractors, but the truth is that both these applications do a superb job of replacing Outlook
• Evolution is probably the only option if you are wedded to Microsoft Exchange Server, and is more unified
• Kontact is really a suite of programs beautifully welded together into a single application, but nevertheless they are separate and this does effect usability
• Thunderbird is available for Windows and Linux

Our MD was passionate about Microsoft Outlook, but was swiftly reassured following a demonstration of Evolution and Kontact. Any small misgivings remaining were dispelled once he realised how much faster Kontact was able to download, sort and filter his messages.

If you don’t require a full PIM, then Mozilla Thunderbird is probably the best mail-only client, and you could install it on your existing Windows server to get your users used to it!

Web Browser

• Firefox (called Iceweasel under Debian) is a superb browser and is available for Windows and Linux
• Konqueror is fast, but, currently at least, problematic with certain plug-ins

However good Firefox undoubtedly is, you will always have the odd website that simply does not work on anything except Internet Explorer. If you’re really unlucky, this will effect a website that is mission-critical for you. You have been warned. Fortunately Firefox is achieving market penetration levels which is forcing webmasters to take notice, so things can only get better.

One particular issue is any website still using Active-X, which is simply not supported on Linux. Fortunately the world seems to agree that Active-X is about the worst thing ever to come out of Redmond, so its impact is on the wane.

Install Firefox on your Windows server to familiarise your users before their transition to Linux

Desktop Publishing

• Scribus is absolutely brilliant.
• Having used QuarkXPress, I found Scribus easier to use and the built-in PDF support fantastic.
• Scribus is available for Windows and Linux

Make sure you install the development branch “scribus-ng” rather than the standard version, as the standard version is almost unusable.

Scribus is free - so why not give it to all your users?

Install under Wine

Wine is not an emulator, rather it is a collection of Linux-compatible Windows libraries. This means that applications installed under Wine are running natively, and in my experience some applications actually run faster than under Windows.

Since the transition to version 1, Wine has become very much more effective a tool and applications that were buggy under Wine have suddenly become much more usable. That said, my advice to anyone is to try Wine for each application and then give up if it doesn’t work well. Don’t do what I did, which was spend weeks of my life and still end up with something less than usable.

Depending on the importance of the application, you could also consider Crossover Linux by Codeweavers. They offer Microsoft Office for Linux and have worked to get Wine working better for many applications. As I understand it, they are actually using an older version of Wine than currently available from WineHQ, so sometimes applications will work better under Wine than under Crossover Linux (at least so I have been told). They are a commercial entity, so if you are a large organisation you may be able to pay Crossover to get a particular application working for you.

Internet Explorer is available from IES4Linux. This worked superbly well for us, until recently when it started hogging vast amounts of CPU, and we had to remove it from all users. Reaches the websites that Firefox cannot reach, but probably cannot be relied upon for mission-critical use; so if you simply have to have Internet Explorer this is probably not your best option.

IES4Linux requires a Microsoft Windows licence for each user, which, unless you have lived on the moon for the past decade, you should be able to provide. There is at least a question-mark over this licensing, so you should make your own enquiries - start at the IES4Linux website.

Publish to Linux desktop

Applications can be published from a Windows server to the Linux desktop:

• Rdesktop
• Citrix
• 2x
• SeamlessRDP

Rdesktop

• http://www.rdesktop.org/

On the positive side, Rdesktop is open source, and is a robust application. It’s probably already installed on your Linux system, and, if not, is only an apt-get away. If it is already installed, then simply typing “rdesktop serverip” will give you a login screen, so this is by far the simplest option available. By itself, Rdesktop is only going to provide you a Windows desktop within your Linux desktop. I.e. you will end-up with a desktop within a desktop. This can be confusing for users, particularly those just learning to cope with Linux. It’s also less secure than providing access to the applications only.

If you are planning an LTSP roll-out and you wish to use this rdesktop-only option, then consider using a screen-script to bypass the Linux desktop and give you a Windows logon instead

Citrix

• http://www.citrix.com/

Installed on a Windows Terminal Server, Citrix does a superb job of publishing applications to a Linux desktop. We currently have Citrix Metaframe 1.8 (Windows 2000 Server) and it is simply superb when published to a Linux desktop. Hard to fault, it is nevertheless stupendously expensive - I recently calculated that, for us, it would treble the cost of the Windows Terminal Server and for that reason we are moving away from Citrix.

• Install Citrix Presentation Server Client

2x

• http://www.2x.com/

Similar to Citrix, but very much simpler to install. I tested this and found it very simple to install and use. Very much cheaper than Citrix, 2x will only marginally increase your Windows cost.

Unfortunately, at the time of my testing 2x, the features did not include the ability to set a client hostname (which was required to work with a particular Windows application) nor did it support client drive mapping. In particular the latter meant that it was not easy to map the Windows “My Documents” folder to the users’ Linux home directory.

I would hope that by now these features would be included, but at the time of writing I could not find out this information from their website. You should make your own enquiries.

• Install 2x client

SeamlessRDP

• http://www.rdesktop.org/
  • http://www.cendio.com/seamlessrdp/
    • http://www.fontis.com.au/rdesktop

This is the only open-source route to application publishing. The good aspects are that it is fully featured - supporting client hostnames, client devices, sound, drive mapping and much else besides. The negatives are that, sadly, there are some issues. Using patched versions of rdesktop this is rather experimental.

That said it is the route we have currently taken and it is working. The issues for us are: Microsoft Word cannot be run as the first application, or for some bizarre reason the File Open dialog opens behind the application window; one particular application cannot be restored when minimised with multiple windows open.

Virtualise

If you are going to run a Windows server, then most Linux advocates would advise you to virtualise it. We have gone one step further in running it in snapshot mode, so that at any time we can kill it and restart it back to the snapshot. This has proved absolutely bulletproof - so far.

• Windows Virtualisation