A Start Menu Replacement in Windows 8

Microsoft recently launched the public beta of Windows 8 - their next operating system release. Windows 8 has been completely redesigned, the OS is optimized for tablets rather then mice and keyboards. I have been running the Windows 8 beta as my main system for about a week now and have encountered more then a few interesting changes.

One of the radical changes that Microsoft made was the complete removal of the Start Menu. The removal of this Windows icon initially left me scrambling to find new ways of performing basic tasks like shutting down the computer. Fortunately, a replacement for the start menu exists.... sort of.

Enter the "links" toolbar

The "links" toolbar is a toolbar that appears on your taskbar next to the notification area. You can enable the links toolbar by right-clicking on any empty space in the taskbar and selecting "links" under "toolbars". You can add shortcuts to your links toolbar by right-clicking on the word "Links" and selecting "open folder." Now you can add your own shortcuts here and they will appear in a drop-down menu when you click on the arrows in the taskbar.

Shutting Down and Rebooting

You can quickly reboot or shutdown your computer by placing a batch file in your "links" folder that runs the shutdown command. Place the following code into notepad and save it as shutdown.bat:

shutdown.exe -s -t 0

Now move "shutdown.bat" into your "links" folder and you can run the batch file from your taskbar. To create a reboot command replace "-s" with "-r" in the above line of code

While the links toolbar isn't a perfect start menu replacement it certainly goes a long way to reducing the shock in the conversion to Windows 8

A better Guide to Hamachi on the Pogo Plug

A few weeks ago I blogged about how to setup the PoGo Plug as an embedded Linux server, in my previous guide I hacked together an old version of LogMeIn Hamachi to get the server accessible through a VPN. The hacked together version of Hamachi was unstable to say the least and I have been searching for a better installation method ever since. Recently, I have managed to install the latest version of Hamachi, which is much more stable than the version I was using previously. In this guide I will explain how to install Hamachi version 2.1.0.18, the latest version to date.

Use a PKGBUILD

The easiest way to install software packages in Arch Linux is to use a PKGBUILD. A PKGBUILD is a series of instructions which automatically downloads a package, extracts it, and executes the installation. Some serious Internet searching revealed the the following package, which was designed to install Hamachi 2.1.0.17. Unfortunately this package was not written to be compatible with Arm systems so I had to make some modifications. You can download my modified PKGBUILD here link.

After you have downloaded my PKGBUILD you must move it to your root directory (/) and you must then cd to that directory. Run the PKGBUILD with the following command

makepkg –skipinteg

You also have to run the installer without integrity checks, just add the skipinteg argument as I have shown above.

Next, you will need to run the install.sh script located in the src directory.

cd /src/logmein-hamachi-2.1.0.18-armel
./install.sh

If it throws some errors don't worrry, I ignored them and mine is still running fine.

After the script finishes, you must initialize Hamachi by browsing to the logmein directory created during the installation and running the daemon:

cd /src/logmein-hamachi-2.1.0.18-armel
./hamachid

Now you can login to the Hamachi servers by typing "hamachi login" and join a network by typing "hamachi join (network name)"

It is important to note that when you reboot your arch system you must start Hamachi using the same "hamachid" script that you just ran. You may want to create a start-up script that automatically calls "hamachid" at boot so you don't have to worry about manually starting the program. You can add Hamachi to your start-up programs by adding the full path to the "hamachid" script in your /etc/rc.local file

It works!

I have been using this installation of Hamachi on my PoGo Plug for about a month now with no problems. I have rebooted my PoGo Plug numerous times and each time Hamachi has initialized without fail. Using the instructions I have outlined in this blog post you should have a stable, production-ready, version of Hamachi on your PoGo Plug.