After toasting one 64bit machine, 2 video cards, and having one start to flake out on me I lost all faith in the wiring down here in this office that the previous owners built. So I got myself a UPS. Here’s hoping.
Picked up two AirLink Desktop Wireless cards. Going to setup them up and move my gateway box out into the garage. This is their Atheros SuperG card – they’re at home so I don’t have the model # on me.. I’ll update it when I get home – so it should work just as well as the PCMCIA card did. Same chipset and all.
Got them at Fry’s for 14.99 a piece. Not too bad for wireless and like I said, they seem to work great with linux. I was a little put off of AirLink at first because it’s not as big as NetGear or LinkSys – at least by appearences. But I’ve been pretty pleased so far. I almost bought the SuperG MIMO router for 20 bucks. But I realized I REALLY didn’t need to spend anymore money.
Speaking of spending money…
I’ve been trying to figure out which new computer I want and how I’m going to get it. Well, it occoured to me this weekend that I’d completely overlooked InfoTech. The computer I’m running now at home is from InfoTech and it’s still churning along even after all the reconfiguring and case swapping I’ve done. It certainly outlasted the 64bit Athlon I got at Fry’s.
My father-in-law took my recommendation to use them a year or two ago and he put together a system on their site. They were nice enough to call him and let him know that he didn’t need a few things he ordered like network card and sound card because they were integrated into the motherboard. I think that right there is a big point in their favor. Most companies would say “Hey.. the customer is right, right? More money for us.” But they called and verified what he wanted and saved him a nice chunk of change.
They build out your system, bench test it, and ship it within days of ordering. I got mine, plugged it in, and I was off and running in no time. Nice.
So I’m looking at getting a box off their site and it’ll be significantly cheaper than Dell – primarily because I can leave out things I have already like drives and monitors and keyboards – and I’ll get the parts that I want, not the cost cutting crappy parts that Dell – or any prebuilt computer company – uses to cut costs.
While I still like the iMac and OSX I think that XGL will give me the eye candy I wanted to play with and allow me to get a 3.2Ghz box for $600 rather than paying $1,000 – $2,000.
And with virtualization I can run OSX enough to get it out of my system… oops I didn’t say that.
Recently my computer at work blew up and I had to reinstall the OS and start from scratch. Backing everything up and starting over was a pain. I decided to minimize any down time in the future by installing Ubuntu and then running windows with virtualization. That way if some new policy – or just the nature of windows – caused my system to experience catastrophic failure again I could simply copy a folder containing a base image complete with dev environment into place and fire the VM back up in no time flat.
I’d used VMWare’s Workstation in the past and I’d heard that they’d recently released VMPlayer for free. Well that was certainly a good price. I downloaded that and while I was scrambling to find a copy of Workstation around the office so I could create my image someone mentioned that you can create images for VMPlayer – which supposedly, as the name suggests, only runs the VMachines but doesn’t create them.
After a bit of digging around I found all the steps I need to setup my new image and start loading windows. I’ll document the steps as follows – mainly so I don’t have to run around all over the place the next time I want to create an image and I’ve forgotten how. This is for installing and setting up on Linux. Namely Ubuntu Breezy.
1) Make sure you have gcc-3.4 and your linux kernel headers installed. (You should know how to work apt-get)
2) Grab VMPlayer from VMWare’s site and install it. I selected bridged network during the install, for what it’s worth.
3) Grab qemu from their site. You need version 0.8.x
4) Create a .vmx file. This is just a text file actually. You can modify an existing file – like the example at the end of this post – or go to this site to have one dynamically generated for you (http://www.consolevision.com/members/dcgrendel/vmxform.html).
5)In the same folder run the following command to create the actual drive image: qemu-img create -f vmdk Drive1.vmdk 2G
(it’s all fairly self explantory. 2G is the size you want the image to be – expand to, it doesn’t take up that much room once created.)
6)Put your install media in the cd drive and select the .vmk from VMPlayer and it should begin installing after the POST. (Note: You can also PXE boot. I had problems with this but I think it was more the scripts the PXE image was trying to run and not VMPlayer)
7)Now you have to install VMTools to get your screen to size right and to get things running a little more smoothly. Download the Evaluation copy of VMWare Workstation. Extract the .iso file of your OS. So I extracted windows.iso. Mount the .iso and then get the files contained into your VM. Run setup and you’re done.
That’s it.
I’ve talked to a couple people and this doesn’t seem to be a violation of the usage agreements. Supposedly VMWare themselves have released a free tool for creating images. So this might all be moot. I believe VMWare Server was mentioned though I’m not sure if that’s the app that creates free images. It’s also been released for free. I’ll have to look into that. It was also suggested that an image created with VMWare’s tools might run better since it will make certain optimization settings.
BONUS:
Here’s an entry I found on making your physical machine a virtual machine. Just what I was looking for.. but about 1 week too late (post crash).
Until then.. happy imaging.
EXAMPLE .VMX BELOW:
I’ve been drooling over the new Power Mac Quad G5 all day. At one point I day dreamed opening one up on Christmas morning and I almost cried. Sooooo pretty.
What kind of power mad, insanely rich, crack head you’d have to be to afford the model with 16G Ram, Suped up 512 Meg cards and the 8 30″ HD Displays that you can outfit the thing with? I think it’d cost about as much as my house… the 16G of ram alone adds $12,000 to the $3,300 price tag. Then $2,400 a piece for the displays. *sigh*
I just looked around and realized I’ve got 6 computers I use at home. But I don’t have a single one that does everything I need. All my World of Warcraft playing tells me that I should be able to use these 6 as regents to create one massively powerful and useful computer. But I don’t see it happening.
Let down of the day. Linux on my 64bit box froze again… wasn’t fixed as I thought it was. And.. the card I have currently in there since my 9600xt bit the dust won’t do DX or OpenGL. So the graphics engine project I’ve been thinking about starting isn’t gonna happen.
But… IPV6 is running again. According to HE it died in June. So I guess I really noticed the loss. =)
Latest Comments