All right Yardley - :beer I reinstall Windoze yearly (even though I rarely use it anymore) - it tends to self destruct. I don't have that problem with Linux. As for imaging software.. try Knoppix Linux. Its a free "Live" CD. Pop it in and reboot - you'll have a full graphical environment running from the CD. Anyway, one of the programs it has is called partimage. You can use this to make (or restore) an image of your Windoze installation. I've now made images of my 2000 and Crap-P installations - so I won't need to rebuild anymore. If you want to try this, let me know and I'll try to help. I've only done it a few times, but have figured out the finer points.
would recommend windows 2000 We use it at work, and I had it at home on a computer that was fried by the power source shorting out-ouch-That WAS a nice computer. Never had trouble with the OS. If you have to use windows, I definitely recommend Win2000Pro (it only comes in "Pro" flavor). It seems much more inherently stable, unlike any windows product that is still evolving out the bugs-i.e. XP. OK, it's maybe not super super stable, if you want to compare it to a Mac OS (which I don't have that much experience with, but as demonstrated previously in this thread, Mac users seem to not have crashes. Although, I have been using a five year old Mac, which freezes up a bit every once in a while, and I have to shut down, though I think it's cuz it's underpowered for using the web-not to flame Macs or anything).
I actually use an Ubuntu (debian based) Desktop for my developing (with an apache/php/perl/mysql environment) and a CentOS server for my remote test server (which is down due to motherboard failure, but wasn't a bad rig - two 80GB 7200 rpm with 8mb buffer in RAID0 and two 80GB 7200rpm 2mb buffer, 1GB of ram, and an older Athlon XP 1.6 processor). I use Windows because its easier, as our entertainment center, for my girlfriend to use than Linux is. Gimp is also my graphic application of choice for some things, not all. Knoppix doesn't really do what I am thinking of doing. I meant something along the lines of Norton Ghost or any of the other various imitations.
Wow. Those words LOOK like english, but I have no idea what you're saying...but then, I just dropped into this thread after reading the one about "prolly"... :laugh:
Ok, here is a comp tech support link... http://www.illwillpress.com/tech.html Hope this helps... Michael
You obviously know more about this than I. Maybe you could compile a custom cd/floppy that will just boot into partimage. I don't know if partimage will burn to CD/DVD, though. Also, if you create a compressed image, you can't restore the MBR exlusively - have to do the whole thing. I'm considering MythTV for a media center. That will be my next project, when I get another MB. GeexBox is an interesting approach - not feature-rich, but nice. Lets me play DVDs (among other things) on an old system - Win2k is now too bloated to smoothly do this on my 500 mHz PIII. Right now I'm building an 8 80-gig disc RAID5 print/file server. Any hints on CentOS? I've done a prelim install of it to see if it'll recognize my hardware (it does). All I need to do is put in the cards, connect up the drives, do a for-real install of CentOS 4, then attempt to compile the kernel for Reiser4 (for the RAID, not the root drive). I was thinking of Solaris 10 - though doubt it'll support all the hardware. When I'm done I'll try to figure out why I felt the need to build it. How is Ubuntu - I've only tried the live CD, but it was very nice. I am planning on changing from Mandrake to Debian this summer - RPMs can be a pain, dependency-wise.
Ubuntu is great if a bit finicky. If you want to use it for development you have to compile all of the stuff you want (for me, Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL) or get the .deb packages with apt, although that didnt work out well. It was a bit more trouble than I like to go through for my development computers but Ubuntu was designed as a user friendly desktop to fit on one disk, not neccesarily a power user tool. It absolutely makes Debian accessable to the masses. As for the dependancies - you're right. apt-get is BEAUTIFUL and if you're thinking of going Debian, I'd almost hands down suggest Ubuntu to do it, especially if you don't do web-based programming (even if you do, it works, but makes the setup time a bit longer) As far as CentOS, there really isnt any tricks. RedHat did a good job of making packages and the converters at CentOS did a good job getting rid of the RH logos and keeping most, if not all of the RHEL packages. Simple to use, easy to setup, no problems at all. MythTV is an AWESOME project, but more than I wanted to go through since my Multimedia Center/Computer is also my development computer (dual boot Windows/Linux) is also our guest computer... etc. I dont have a big apartment, so for now, my days of 5 household computers are on hold. Solaris - I've never had the opportunity to use it. Always wanted to, though. Never used Reiser4 for any of my file systems either, but to be honest, EXT3 has performed so flawlessly that I dont feel I'd gain the benefits of using Reiser in the way my server is used. Im sure I could find some sort of free/opensource software to build a full image of my PC, I really only want the OS and installed apps (as I keep all my backups, DVD backups, software backups, etc, on a seperate HD.) I need to get the server running again, I've decided to ditch the RAID as money was tight and my mom needed a new computer. I broke it up into two computers - hers being an Athlon XP64 and the new server sticking with the Athlon XP line, but a bit faster. It has also been cut down to 512Mb of ram as it is mostly a low-load web server used to display temporary sites and to further my testing on other systems/OS'. Its also a file server, but the size of the files being moved over it dont require a huge amount of disk space. I just need to get a new MB for it, I've already got the processor and everything else.
Is it true that Ubuntu debs are forking a bit much, causing some incompatibility with Debian? I do the same as you with my data files. That's why I want the file server, since I'll be playing with different OSes on different machines. Its a low end machine, but since it will only be for central storage, it won't take much. I'm using Reiser3 on my Mandrake box - not bad. Basically I'm using it because its there . Now that Solaris 10 is FOSS (well, sort of) I just have to try it on something.
