August 28th, 2008
Now IE8 Beta2 is out, I decided to give it a try.
First impression: it’s much faster than compare to IE7.
I am using it with Google reader, other than some layout issues with the action footer for each item, everything seemed fine.
Update: Turned on the compatibility view, everything worked fine.
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June 11th, 2008
A couple of points on running Virtual Server 2005 R2 on Home Server:
While trying to install UBuntu on Virtual Server 2005, at one point, I gave up, decided to try VMWare Virtual Servers 2.0. VMWare did not like the \\YourHomeServer\VM path notation for virtual hard drives, it kept complaining the size was too small to create the hard drive. On Home server, other than C, you could not use any local hard drive letters, so I had to go back to Virtua Server 2005 R2.
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June 8th, 2008
I am running my home server on an AMD dual-core 4200 box with 4GB of RAM. It mainly served as a file server, thought I could utilize it a bit more. Running virtual machines is the natural choice.
I wanted to be able to run the VMS without login the home server, so it seems I need the Virtual servers: Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMWare virtual server. They both are free.
Since Home Server is essentially Windows Business Server 2003 stand edition, so I decided to try Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 first.
Within an hour, I have Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed and an instance of Windows Server 2008 Trial up and running. That’s promising, but I did not want to run a trial version of Windows 2008. How about Linux?
First, tried to install Fedora, but could not get anything going past the boot screen. I gave up after several tries. Decided to go with UBuntu. Downloaded the desktop, and went a little bi further, but after the initial screen, everything went black. After Googling a bit, found that was a color depth issue, following the instructions on the net and forty minutes later, I reached the final reboot screen.
After clicking the button, the VM rebooted, but hang shortly after the boot screen. Remember the old DOS days, if you had a piece of incompatible device driver, your machine would not even start.
Again, back to Google, but this time nothing came up. Someone suggested going into to recovery mode at the grub screen. That’s did not help, but it did prove one thing: indeed it hang while detecting some kind of device.
After hours of trying, I was at a point of giving up, then I noticed the “Enable hardware-assisted virtualization if available” check box. I unchecked it, and powered on the VM. Boom, everything worked!
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May 18th, 2008
I have been trying to install Boot Camp 2.1 ever since it has been released. But every time, I got the following error message:
"The installer encountered errors before boot camp could be configured"
I have XP running under BC 2.0, tried everything I could find on the Web:
None of the above helped. I sort of gave up on it until I got the XP SP3 update notice.
Spent another hour or so trying out different things, still the same error message, seems going no where, then I noticed I have two Live Mesh video adapters installed. As the last resort, I uninstalled the two video adapters and restarted the BC 2.1 upgrade for the Nth time. Wala, it worked!! Everything went smoothly, after the reboot, I have BC 2.1. Windows XP Sp3 is next to be installed!
Lessons learned:
Uninstall any Video Adapters that is not installed by Boot Camp 2.0. You should have only either an ATI or Nvidia adapter under the Video Adapters in Device Manager.
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