Sunday, February 10, 2008

It's my Vista Party and I'll cry if I want to

You would cry too if it happened to you.

Last week I was handed a new Vista Ultimate(tm) machine as my primary Java development machine. Yes, I wept. I tossed and turned for nights wondering WHY WHY did this happen to me? But as a social experiment and respect for my new boss, I'm going to give it a good ol college try. So far, Java 1.5 and Eclipse installed just fine. I stripped almost every feature from Vista that I could using this very reasonable gamers tweak guide for speeding up Vista. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2247431,00.asp

But I hit my first wall when trying to install MySQL 5.0. MySQL MySQLInstanceConfig 5.0.51a simply does not work on any version of Vista due to some error with UAC configuration. Admittedly, it was the MySQL developers fault, not Vista. MySQL 5.0.45 is the latest version of MySQL to actually run properly on Vista as of this posting.

Charging forward with Vista laptop in hand....

3 comments:

Joshbw said...

But I hit my first wall when trying to install MySQL 5.0. MySQL MySQLInstanceConfig 5.0.51a simply does not work on any version of Vista due to some error with UAC configuration

Its a shame there arent more projects like XAMPP out there. If you wanted (for whatever insane reason) to install MySQL, Apache, and PHP on a windows box at once there is no better way. It works flawlessly even in vista with no need to then go edit conf files and so forth. Unfortunately you can't leave out PHP and I suspect you want MySQL for a cheap DB to interact with from Java rather than to set up a bitchin' LAMP machine (there should probably be a <sarcasm> tag there).

Personally I run my dev databases out of a VM even on my laptop (virtual PC is free and fast) which is an option to get MySQL up and running if you have a spare XP license (or want to run it from Linux). Setting up a loopback network connection to connect from the host to the VM isn't overly intuitive but there are some good tutorials on the net.

Jim Manico said...

Josh,

I should have responded to your intelligent post long ago. Thanks for your comments, you are right on. I ended up downgrading to MySQL 5.0.49 and I'm back in business. Vista is pretty but slow. I ended up setting the visuals to "tune for best performance", updated all drivers, and turned off all unnecessary services - and I'm happy. Still running XP on my main workstation - but I've made peace with Vista. Now OSX is still another story.... :)

Jim Manico said...

6 months later - I've jumped back to XP. My VPN now connects in 2 seconds instead of 15. Eclipse is screaming fast again. No more blue screening. Everything just "works" and is fast again. Although watching Jerry and Bill eat churros together was very compelling, I am going to skip Vista. It's a wash for true power users.