Over the past few weeks my laptop has been ailing. The laptop I am referring to is an Acer Aspire 3613LCi that I purchased at the Staples day-after-Thanksgiving sale last year. Now, when I purchased the machine I was in need of a new machine in a hurry. I needed a functional machine to finish up a few projects and didn’t care what it was or what it was running.

When I purchased the machine and was unable to get CentOS up and running quickly, I defaulted back to the included Windows XP Home package and continued on my way. This setup has worked well (as soon as I installed more RAM) as I mentioned, until recently. As Windows tends to do when you install and remove a bunch of software and utilities and mess with stuff that one shouldn’t, things started breaking. This morning I decided that it was finally time to give it another shot at running a Linux distro on this thing.

The distro I chose was Fedora Core 5. Mainly because I learned on RedHat and I had a fresh copy of FC5 sitting around that I had not, yet tried out. The main failure in my previous attemts at Linux bliss were Wireless support and utilizing Bluetooth to connect to Cingular’s GPRS network with my Motorola v551.

The posts that will follow on this blog cronical exactly what I had to do to get everything running just the way I wanted it.

Stay Tuned!

As many of you may or may not know, VMWare recently introduced a free beta of their replacement product for GSX server. They are really trying to keep a hold of their place in the virtualization market and I couldn’t be happier.

The news got even better when I received what I believe to be good news in my email recently. Basically, the message in part states that they intend to keep VMWare Server free even after the final release. Very cool indeed. Take a look at the email linked to below.

VMWare Beta eMail

Miramar High School configures and delivers 3000 iBooks in 3 days. Pretty impressive. Take a look at the pictures.

I have switched dp9x.com from Apache to LightTPD in hopes of gaining better performance. I’m still working on tweaking this setup as I currently have php running as a CGI instead of FastCGI. I really didn’t want to take the time to re-compile PHP with FastCGI support (and it didn’t work out of box).
Even with php as a CGI, performance still seems to be acceptable for the load I expect. The admin interface of wordpress is almost un-usable, but I am using jBlogEditor to post anyway.

For quite some time now I have been on a quest for the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail of which I speak is a universal filesystem. You see, ideally I would like to be able to connect an external drive to my Mac at work, my Powerbook, my Windows machine at home, and my Linux Workstations at home. Sometime last year I found the first piece of this puzzle in the form of ext2fsx. An ext2/3 filesystem driver for MacOS X Panther. This bridged at least my Mac at work to my Linux machines at home.
Just recently, I have found a final piece to the puzzle. I found an article on Digg a few weeks ago to ext2 ifs. This is a true IFS system driver (using Microsoft’s IFS framework) that allows full read/write access to ext2/3 volumes in Windows. I have already used this driver to copy several gigabytes of data from my laptop to an external 200GB ext3 volume.
The future is now- and the future is great!

Or something like that. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this blog yet. It’s really just serving as a placeholder on my server. It looks a lot better than the CentOS test page that has been there for months.