WiFi is an incredible technology that has transformed how and where people used computers, however besides advancements in speed, range and security, very little has changed how we use wireless networks. Since 2002, Microsoft Research has been exploring a fascinating idea to virtualize the WiFi adapter, turning a single piece of hardware and radio into virtually (pun) unlimited adapters. Years after the project was seemingly abandoned, it is now uncovered Virtual WiFi technology has been baked into the Windows 7 networking foundations.

In essence, how Virtual WiFi works is very similar to how virtualization works for operating systems which most people are familiar with - the transparent sharing of limited hardware resources to many operating systems. Virtual WiFi, abbreviated to VWiFi, is a software layer that abstracts the wireless LAN card hardware into multiple virtual adapters. The software handles the connections of each adapter to ensure every adapter has an opportunity to connect to their respective networks limited by time. The result is an operating system none-the-wiser and acts as if you have multiple WLAN hardware adapters working independently.

If you like to dabble in a little hardware jargon, here’s an obligatory architecture diagram which explains how Virtual WiFi works in Windows 7 in much more detail.

If you got lost somewhere between the dotted lines, read on.

You might be wondering why anyone would ever need multiple WLAN adapters on the same PC, well to be honest, you don’t need but its sometimes good to have. In any case where you’re connected to an existing wireless access point and want to connect to another network whether that be a separate access point or even set up an ad-hoc connection, Virtual WiFi will allow you to do just that. But perhaps the scenario that is more appealing is the idea of a mesh network. In a mesh network, every client becomes a repeater, growing the network organically as more clients connect. Virtual WiFi enables this, since every client can become an access point too.

Now you might be asking, “I’ve looked at every nook and cranny of Windows 7 RC, how come I haven’t seen this feature?”. Surprisingly, the feature is in Windows 7 today and has been for quite some time apparently, but hasn’t been exposed due to a lack of driver support. WLAN hardware vendors are required to recompile their drivers with a couple new additions. The good news is that Virtual WiFi functionality is going to be a requirement for WLAN drivers under the Windows 7 certification logo so expect to see it soon.

Assuming it all goes to plan, the feature will be automatically exposed.

“On Windows 7 and later, the operating system installs a virtual device if a Hosted Network capable wireless adapter is present on the machine. This virtual device normally shows up in the “Network Connections Folder” as ‘Wireless Network Connection 2’ with a Device Name of ‘Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport adapter’ if the computer has a single wireless network adapter. This virtual device is used exclusively for performing software access point (SoftAP) connections [...]. The lifetime of this virtual device is tied to the physical wireless adapter. If the physical wireless adapter is disabled, this virtual device will be removed as well.”

Unfortunately as it seems, the implementation of Virtual WiFi in Windows 7 is not as liberal as the research prototype. In Windows 7, you are limited to exactly one virtual adapter. However by looking at the impact of multiple virtual adapters on latency and performance from their original research report, this is probably for good reasons.

More technical information aimed at hardware vendors and developers is available at the WinHEC 2008 session, “Wireless LAN Enhancements In Windows 7″, PowerPoint downloadable here. You can also learn more about their original prototype and research paper here.

Obviously this feature isn’t as glamorous as the fancy new wallpapers or as practical as Aero Snap in Windows 7, but I think it represents one of the many silent revolutions in Windows that probably won’t be recognized and taken for granted for releases to come. I’d be interesting to see if Virtual WiFi catches on, and how new networking scenarios can be enabled by developers and hardware vendors. (Source)

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Computerworld — 

After months of problems that delayed the last two betas of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla Corp. is now on track to deliver the first release candidate early next month.

If Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate (RC) is declared suitable for final release, Mozilla may still make its self-set deadline -- before the end of the first half of the year.

Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, was optimistic in a note published on the site last Thursday. "We're setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, May 20 for Firefox 3.5 RC," he wrote.

"Code freeze" is a term Mozilla uses to describe a development stage when it blocks changes in anticipation of handing off the build to internal testers.

"We'll check back against schedule on Tuesday [May 19], but (it) looks like the finish line is very much in sight!" said Beltzner. Assuming Firefox 3.5 RC's code is frozen on Wednesday, Beltzner said that the preview would ship the "first week of June."

Three weeks ago, Mozilla released the fourth, and final, beta of the browser. At the time, the company was still citing a final release before the end of June.

Last year, when Mozilla was making its final push on Firefox 3.0, it used a pair of release candidates, the last of which was issued June 4. It launched the final version two weeks later, on June 17.

If Mozilla sticks to just a single release candidate for Firefox 3.5, it could still ship the completed browser next month. As of Sunday, Mozilla's bug-tracking database showed that developers have 54 "blocking bugs" -- problems that would stymie the final release -- to address.

It's possible, however, that Mozilla will need multiple release candidates to shake out all of Firefox 3.5's bugs, a fact the company acknowledged earlier this month. "While we will aim to make RC1 perfect, previous Firefox releases have needed up to 3 RCs before we're ship-ready," said Mozilla in notes posted on its site from a May 5 meeting.

Firefox 3.5, which at one point early in development was planned to ship in late 2008 or early 2009, has been delayed several times as Mozilla added more test builds to deal with troublesome bugs, and to integrate TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine, as well as other new features.

According to U.S.-based Web measurement company Net Applications, Firefox owned 22.5% of the browser market last month.

For its part, Mozilla said last week that Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is being used by about 650,000 users, a statistic it tracks as Active Daily Users (ADU) and obtains by counting the number of update requests the browser makes each day to the company's servers.

The current test version, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 63 different languages from Mozilla's site.

Computerworld

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Windows 7 is free for now, and works extremely well on netbooks. That said, installing the OS on these tiny laptops—especially low-end models—can be daunting. Here's how to do it, the easy way:

If the Release Candidate is any indication (and it should be), then Windows 7 will be a nice upgrade for any Windows user. The new OS, however, is a huge step up for netbook users. Vista is notoriously poorly suited to netbooks; a buggy resource hog that subjects its users to incessant dialog boxes and requires far too many clicks to perform basic tasks, it's kind of a nightmare to use on a 9-inch laptop with a 1.5-inch trackpad.

Windows XP has been given a boost by netbooks, as its system requirements—more-or-less decided in 2001—are more in line with the specs hardware like the Eee PC and Mini 9. But let's face it: XP is nearly a decade old. Its user experience is trumped by free alternatives like Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Linpus, and it's not at all optimized for solid-state drives—especially cheap ones. This means that on low-end, SSD-based netbooks, it borders on unusable.

Hence, Windows 7. It's noticeably faster than Vista on low-spec machines, properly optimized for netbook hardware, and, most importantly, free (for now). Thing is, installation isn't quite as easy as it is on a regular PC—in fact, it can be a pain in the ass: netbooks don't have DVD drives, which means you've either got to get your hands on an external drive or boot from a USB stick for a clean install. Furthermore, smaller SSDs, like the 8GB units in popular versions of the Dell Mini 9 and Acer Aspire One, make a default installation impossible, or at least impractically tight. Luckily, there are simple methods to deal with both of these problems. Let's get started.

What You'll Need

• A netbook (Minimum 1GB of RAM, 8GB storage space)

• A 4GB or larger USB drive

• A Windows 7 RC Image (details below)

• A Windows XP/Vista PC or a Mac to prepare the flash drive

• For low-end netbooks, lots (and lots) of time

Getting Windows 7

Downloading Windows 7 is a piece of cake. Just navigate to this page and download the 32-bit version. You'll need to get a free Windows Live ID if you don't already have one, but this takes about two minutes.

Microsoft will then give you your very own Windows 7 License key, valid until June 1st of next year. (Although after March 1st, it'll drive you to the edge of sanity by shutting off every two hours. But that's a different story, and March is a long way off). Microsoft will then offer up your ISO through a nifty little download manager applet, complete with a "resume" function. There are ways to sidestep this, but don't: you'd be surprised how hard it is to keep a single HTTP connection alive for long enough to download a 2.36GB file.

Preparing Your Flash Drive

This is the annoying part, but it's not necessarily that difficult. Here are some guides, by OS (some linked for length):
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Mac OS X (courtesy of Ubuntu, funnily enough):

 

1. Open a Terminal (under Utilities)

2. Run diskutil list and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)

3. Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN (replace N with the disk number from the last command; in the previous example, N would be 2)

4. Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.iso of=/dev/diskN bs=1m (replace /path/to/downloaded.iso with the path where the image file is located; for example, ./windows7.iso)

5. Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes (this can take a few hours on slower drives)

As some commenters have pointed out, you can also make a flash drive bootable with utilities like LiveUSB Helper. Once you've done this, you can mount your Windows 7 ISO with a utility like DaemonTools Lite (For Windows) or MountMe (for Mac), and just copy over all the files to your newly-bootable drive.

Starting Your Install

Ok! Now you've got a bootable flash drive, and you're ready to start installing. It should go without saying, but once you start this process, you'll lose all existing data on your netbook, so you should back up any important files before going through with anything from here forward.

Insert your USB drive and reboot your netbook. As soon as your BIOS screen flashes, you should see instructions for a) changing your netbook's boot order or b) entering its BIOS setup. In the first situation, simply assign the USB drive as the first boot device. In the second, navigate through your BIOS settings until you find a "Default Boot Order" page, and do the same thing there.

From there, you should see the first Windows 7 installation screens. Anyone with a 16GB or larger storage device in their netbook can just follow the instructions until the installation completes, and skip the next step.

—

If your SSD is smaller than 16GB, or if you just want to save some space, do what they say, but only until the first reboot. After the Windows 7 installer has restarted your computer, you'll need to modify the boot order again. Do not allow installation to continue! Manually change the boot order to prioritize the USB drive again, just as you did at the beginning of the installation.

Compression!

Once the Windows 7 installer has copied most of its system files to your drive, you're going to tighten them up with Windows' trusty old "Compact" command. Here's what you do, as described by Electronic Pulp:

Choose "Repair" at the Windows 7 Setup screen, go to "Command Prompt" and enter the following code:

d: (or whatever drive letter is assigned to your SSD)
cd \windows\system32
compact.exe d:\*.* /c /s /i

And wait. And wait and wait and wait. This can take anywhere from eight hours to two days, so you'll want to set your netbook down in a corner and forget about it for a while. [Note: compressing so many of your system files does have a performance cost, but in day-to-day use, it's negligible]

Once this is done, reboot the netbook again and let it continue the installation as normal. That's it!

All said and done, an 8GB SSD should have nearly 2GB of free space left—not much, but enough to work with. And given that most netbooks come with inbuilt, flush SD expansion slots, and that high-capacity SD cards are extremely affordable, having a small amount of space on your root drive isn't at all prohibitive.

There are other ways to slim down a Windows 7 install—namely by using programs like vLite, which can strip out some of Windows' fat directly from the ISO—but Windows' built-in file compression is the easiest way to squeeze Windows 7 onto your skimpy 8GB SSD.

Setup and Customization Help
Windows 7 runs fairly well out of the box, but as with any new Windows installation, you're going to need to download some drivers to get things working properly. Vista drivers usually do the trick, but sometimes workarounds are necessary. Thankfully, most popular netbooks have spawned helpful fan forums, many of which have active Windows 7 subforums. Some of the best:

• Aspire One
• ASUS Eee Pc
• Dell Mini
• MSI Wind
• HP Mini-Note

From: gizmodo.com

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