blog.haraldkraft.de

When you’re using an “external” tool for handling ZIP archive file (and the likes), it can be really annoying when you double-click on such a file in Windows Explorer (or other file browsers) and Windows treats the file as a compressed folder and doesn’t start the external application even though file associations are correctly set.

Some tuning tools like XP-Antispy are able to disable the functionality of compressed folders, however it didn’t work for me on Vista the last time I tried.
After a while of research I found the solution how to edit the registry, so that double-clicking associated files will truly be opened with the external application:

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Throughout these past weeks, I’ve installed Opera on a few new systems (with various operating systems btw) and had to make (just) a few adjustments. One of them included setting my own keyboard setup. Even though making my custom shortcut settings was easily done each time (via Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> “Keyboard setup” Duplicate + Edit, see Tamil’s blog for a nice description), embarrassingly I had forgotton how to actually “enable” the modified keyboard setup.

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Recently I was facing the issue whether it’s possible to associate files with a certain filename to be opened with a particular program in Windows operating systems. These could be files named TODO, README, INSTALL, LICENSE and the likes, as they are widely common in the unix world.

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After the first complications with the quadruple boot, I was facing new ones when I tried to do everything again on a new hard drive.
The installation order was 1. Windows XP 2. Windows 7 (which recognized the “old” XP and integrated it in the boot loader) 3. Ubuntu 9.04 4. OpenSolaris 2009.06
(for detailed partition info see quadruple-boot blog entry).

The boot process would then be like this:

• load OpenSolaris GRUB from third primary
1. boot OpenSolaris from third primary
2. load Microsoft bootloader from first primary
3. load Microsoft bootloader from second primary
1. boot Windows 7 from C: (as first primary)
2. boot Windows XP from E: (as second primary)
• boot Ubuntu (several entries for different kernels) from logical

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Setting up my new computer (AMD Phenom II X4 810 (Deneb), 4×2.6GHz, 8192MB RAM, 500GB WesternDigital, GeForce 9400GT, 1GBit+54MBit) was a bitch. Especially since I wanted a very specific OS setup.

The primary targets were Windows XP (SP3) and Ubuntu (9.04) for coding purposes, secondly Windows 7 RC for testing purposes and OpenSolaris for experience.
I did a lot of installing and reinstalling this past week, until I finally managed to get all four systems working and accessible.

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