Sorry for the long break

I apologize for not blogging for a long while now. It appears that some crazy people are actually interested in what I write ;-). So I've resolved to start again :-). What's new? Well, in the last 6 months, I've assembled a dual core AMD 3800+ system for home use with the help of a Colleage at work. As with all tech stuff, the price of the processor has dropped drastically before I figured out something useful to do with the system.

Intel's new Core 2 Duo processors now appear to the best processors on earth. I am a big fan of AMD, but this time Intel seems to have a winner. For multi-core systems, AMD still appears to have the edge because of their better interconnect technology. AMD's new DDR2 based AM2 platform doesn't seem to be a significant upgrade. I am still hoping AMD will manage to pull a rabbit out of it's hat :-). In addition to better performance at lower power consumption (as if that's not enough!), another nice thing about Core 2 Duo systems is hardware support for virtualization with Intel's VT technology.

Speaking of Virtualization, VMWare Server is now free. This means I no longer have to build VMWare virtual disks using qemu-img. VMWare Server is really good, but I failed to configure booting from my existing Windows installation inside Linux (or vice-versa). Vice-versa (I mean existing Linux inside Windows) sort of works but I have to put in some funny hacks. I have a SATA drive, WindowsXP seems to think of it as a IDE drive despite installing the proper SATA drivers. The upshot of this is that, when Linux boots inside VMWare, the disk appears as hda, whereas when booting natively, the SATA drive appears as sda. I'll keep playing around with this.