Monday, September 14, 2009

VIM's Backspace Problem

On clic machines, when I type [BACKSPACE] trying to delete the character to the left of the cursor, I get a ^? inserted. This is caused by a wrong mapping from ^H to ``erase character'' in ~/.bashrc.

Two solutions:
  • Remove the mapping in your ~/.bashrc file. In my case, that line is ``stty erase ^H''.
  • Add to your ~/.vimrc file this line: set t_kb=[press CTRL+V][press BACKSPACE]. [press CTRL+V] and [press BACKSPACE] mean you must press the two keys in this order.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Install Vista Ultimate w/o SP1 on Machines with AHCI Enabled

The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a programming-specification which defines the operation of Serial ATA host-controllers (also known as host bus adapters) in a non implementation-specific manner. The specification describes a system memory structure for computer hardware vendors to exchange data between host system memory and attached storage-devices. (excerpt from wikipedia)

Vista Ultimate w/o SP1 cannot be installed directly on a machine with AHCI enabled. You'll probably get a bluescreen crash during boot. However, you can do a trick to work around this problem. Here are the steps:

  1. Disable AHCI in BIOS. You may have to disable Flash Cache Module as well.
  2. Install Vista Ultimate (w/o SP1).
  3. Start the registry editor, and set the value of "Start" to 0 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci.
  4. Install AHCI driver. After that, you should be able to see msahci.sys under C:\windows\system32\drivers.
  5. Restart your computer, and enable AHCI in BIOS.