Screws In My Coffeethe ramblings of a brown dirt cowboy
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I rode my bike into Austin on my inaugural Cedar Park to Austin bike commute. It was so cold that when I got 3 miles from my house I had to turn around and go back and get my winter gloves. This morning it was 48 degrees but when I got to 20 MPH my fingers started to hurt. I had no other problems except that I have the usual sore butt from not riding in 8 months. That will resolve itself by riding more.
The last two weeks have been spent inside mostly. I have not run during this time. My personal time on weekends has been divided between doing volunteer support for the Rocky Racoon race in Huntsville and fixing my computer. I have not been drawing on Friday either so this month has been quite a change from my routine.
I have regained some of the lost abilities by re-building my home server with CentOS. I really like using Linux and I hope that I can keep it as my host operating system. My experiment with using virtual PCs is proving to be very time consuming to set up. I will spend one more day working on completing the project. My beta test with a small Vista virtual PC was successful. My goal was to see if I could build a Vista box and then have access to it using remote desktop from Sylvia’s computer. I completed this test last night. Now I will build a production virtual PC tomorrow and she will use it to work on her landscape projects.
This weekend I will get out and run. I also plan to ride my bike at least one mile.
After a long absence from the Linux community I am disappointed about the lack of support for easy RAID5 in Ubuntu (Debian). I spent about 3 days trying to get RAID 5 to work under Ubuntu with my onboard Fake Raid controller from Intel. What I learned is that my next purchase will be a real hardware based RAID controller from 3Ware. I have avoided these add on controlers because of the cost, and now I realize that they are worth it. I added RAID card into a client’s computer about a month ago and installed Windows XP on it without any problems. The 3Ware cards are supported in all OSs including Linux and Vista.
I am installing CentOs 5 (RedHat clone) using software RAID. This is what I had on the computer yease ago. I say this is the same computer, but in reality the only thing that is original is the Antec Tower case and fans. I had to compromise and put the boot partition on a single drive because I did not hade a drive to do a RAID1 configuration. I will regret thsi in about a year.
My plan for this computer is to install VMware server and then install virtual machines using the operating systems that I like. If I have to rebuild the host computer I cna off-load the virtual machine images and then re-install them after rebuilding the computer.
So this evening at 7:45 PM I have a Cent0s 5.2 system. I have never run any virtualzation software so I am trying gemu which comes with CentOS. I am installing Vista and I hope that my computer with 4 GB of memory will be enough to work.
About two weeks ago my last disk died in my RAID5 on my home computer. I originally built the computer when I lived in Portland Oregon in 2002. I started out with three Western Digital 80 GB hard drives in a software RAID5 running Mandrake Linux. The first upgrade was a new main board and three 160 GB drives and Windows XP. I did this upgrade in 2006 and kept the case. The third upgrade was a new Dual Core main board 1000 watt power supply and Vista. I kept the three 160 GB drives. In 2008 two 160gb drives failed and hte last one fialed in January 2009. When the first two drives failed I replaced them with 500 GB drives. Drives have become really cheap now days.
Now I am rebuilding the computer again. I have removed all of the 160 GB drives and two 80 GB drives. I decided that I want to go back to a Linux OS on the computer and use a virtual computer software to run Windows. I will use VMware or something else to get Windows Vista to work. I am downloading Ubuntu and I will install it tonight.
Reget does it again. I downloaded desktop by mistake and it took 45 min. I decided to install Reget on the Dell laptop and the same size ISO is going to take 20 min. I am going with Ubuntu 8.10 server because is is based on Debian and is supported by Vmware. Most of the other distributions that VMware supports are the enterprise versions which cost money. I know that I will be hacking and doing custom builds soon, but at least I want to start off with a Linux that has documented support for VMware Server which is what I will be running first. I want to install Windows 7 and see what it looks like.
While I was trying to install Vista on a clean machine (failed 3 times) I wrote down all of the versions of MS operating systems that I have used.
The next version of Windows is Windows 7. I am not sure how MS came up with the number 7. According to my list the next version of Windows is Windows 9.
I like watching Craig Furguson on the Late Late Show. When I can not stay up late I watch the recordings that are on my computer. I enjoy his sense of humor and the crazy way he slaps the TV camera during his monologue. Thsi episode he has some hand puppets that are singing.