On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 2:39 AM, Todd And Margo Chester
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>> Or, stop trying to talk to the disk directly and move away from the
>> "dump" command.
>
>
> Loe dump.  When I discovered that cutting a DVD would corrupt
> your local hard drive (Red Hat since fix it for me), not once
> but twice, I used /dump/restore to recover EVERYTHING.  I could
> have lost my business!  I am big fan of dump/restore.

I get faster re-installs by using rsync of things I care about
(possibly everything!) to separate media. Tied to rsnapshot, I also
get incremental, on-line, timestamped backups of the last week's or
few month's changes. I'm much more likely to say "dang, I accidentally
screwed up something!" and want the backup. With the rsynced
snapshots, I can directly "cp" or "sync" from another host the exact
file, and much more easily run diffs against them or against their
directory layouts. This is..... awkward, with dump/restore, unless
you're always doing full "level 0" dumps and have lots of play space
to run the restore in.

Backup is good: I'm suggesting you can use a better backup technology,
one that is not so dependent on hammering the disk so directly.

> W7 is a good clean up of Vista, but it is still Vista.
> I had just finished swallowing some food when I saw the
> full show (on Netflix): I could of choked to death!  As
> it was, I almost past out from laughing so hard -- my arm
> were tingling and I got really light headed.

Well, yeah, it's funny. It's just not really relevant to your XP/W7
backup interference differences. As you've seen, XP is interfering
with your disk performance in virtualization. Windows 7 isn't. With XP
on "legacy support", it's incredibly unlikely that Microsoft will ever
fix that.

> Just a career note: I am a private contractor.  I exchanged
> one boss for about 500 bosses.  If I don't work on what they
> want me to (mostly XP), I don't eat.  I am one of the few
> computer guys our here that will just tell them the truth
> and not evangelize for their favorite technology.  (I do wish
> more of them used Linux.  Linux is a blast to work on.  I don't
> care much for Apple, though I work on them too -- have to
> eat.)  Some do use (swear at) Windows 7, so I do keep up to date.
> What a piece of junk!

It does virtualize better than XP, as you're noticing. For
virtualization tools like VMWare, it's much better integrated, too.
(How well do either integrate with the KVM virtualization? I've really
not gone back to that since SL 6.0, and am actually curious.)

> By the way, if you skip using AHCI and just program the bios
> for IDE, you don't even have to use an f6 disk to install XP.
> No sign of drivers doing XP in yet.  Although the day will come.
>
> Great letter.  Thank you!

You didn't notice any performance issues with virtualized IDE versus SCSI?

XP on laptops is now pretty ugly due to chipset upgrades that just
aren't XP supported. Netbooks that have more than enough power for XP
are nightmares to install. And for high end server components, like
10G Ethernet, it's also difficult to support. So yeah, virtualizing XP
is a good way to go if you have to support it.

> Windows 8 is so, so bad, swear words have yet been created
> to express it.  Since M$ now wants to control the hardware
> too (Apple style), maybe all computer makers will throw
> behind Wine and make Wine such that all Windows programs
> will run on it and just dump M$.  Maybe we could get
> IBM to lend us some of their old OS/2 developers -- they
> had Windows emulation down real well.  About twice as
> fast as native windows, as I remember.

Take a good look at what Fedora is doing to remain bootable on
"Windows 8" compatible hardware. There's some interesting complexity
with getting a shim for "grub" built with a trusted certificate, that
I expect Scientific Linux 7 to have to replicate with $99 purchased
certificate in the future.

> I am going to make a lot of money off of W8!

Hopefully worth the blood, sweat, and tears.