NOTE: This method is not for experienced System administrators, who happen to have or are willing to setup a PXE boot Server. If you can boot from a PXE server, no media required, please do so, and don’t follow this method. For more information on why this method may be completely wrong and a waste of your time read this post: How Not to Install Linux by Demetri J. Mouratis

This is a step by step, with screen shots of the Installation of Ubuntu 7.10 Server edition. Installation takes less then 15 minutes, depending on your system, speed of optical drive and amount of time the server spends waiting for you to hit next.

For more information on Ubuntu server, visit their website at http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition

The hardware used is an entry level Dell PowerEdge Servers, brand new out of the box. The model is SC440, and very pleased to announce no driver issues at this point. The system shipped with an Intel Dual Core Pentium and 512 meg of ram. It is highly recommended to upgrade the ram, and this system will be maxed to out the full 4 gig when the shipment arrives from Crucial.com later this week.

Step 0. Download Ubuntu CD Image,
The CD Image, in ISO format, can be downloaded from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download Make sure you choose the correct “type computer you have”, in our case it is 64bit installation.

Next, burn ISO to CD, this can vary greatly depending on the operating system you are on, the software you have and the type of cd or dvd you may be burning. I suggest searching Google for a detailed step by step guide just for this portion.

burn cd iso windows xp
burn cd iso windows vista
burn cd iso linux
burn cd iso osx

I used Disc Juggler, which is available as a demo. The demo has a file size cap as well as a speed cap, but it does a fine job burning the ISO image, and doesn’t generate many coasters.

Step 1. Boot the Server from the CD,
Insert the CD into the servers optical drive. Depending on your configuration you may need to hit f11 to enter the boot device option screen. Once the CD has booted this is the first screen you should see:

Go ahead and choose Install to the Hard Disk, by hitting Enter.

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday it would buy Swedish open-source developer MySQL AB for about $1 billion to expand into the $15 billion database market, and that preliminary quarterly results showed no impact from the slowing U.S. economy.

“But the biggest news of the day is… we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you’re an industry insider, you’ll know what that means - we’re acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database.” (source)

“Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.” (source)

Involved Companies:
http://www.mysql.com/
http://www.sun.com/

Hardware requirements

Hyper-V requires an x64-based processor, hardware-assisted virtualization, and hardware data execution protection. The following hardware has been tested extensively and is suitable for use with Hyper-V. Some of the hardware requires an update to the BIOS, as noted. This list does not imply support of the platform for Hyper-V by the respective vendors.

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Recently while visiting relatives for the holidays I got to play around with Windows Media Center for the first time. It really isn’t much but a clean simple interface for watching “media” on a windows XP system. I personally have always been a fan of Winamp, even though it is owned by AOL, but it is a great platform with tons of options.

So, the idea came to me, that if I virtualized Windows Media Center I could hook up a USB HDTV tuner and map it to the virtual machine. With all the specials at Best Buy this weekend it was really promising, until I actually tried it.

As you can see, from the image it doesn’t support the media center inside of the virtual machine. So I decided not to purchase the HDTV tuner, so there may be ways to get it to work, but it really seems unlikely.

Vista Ultimate Media Center in Virtual PC Form - Not Great
Virtual PC Guy’s WebLog : Windows Media Center 2005 under Virtual PC
Microsoft Announces New Media Center Extenders
Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2004 is now FREE - Does it work from MCE 2002? | Ask MetaFilter

Sources:
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Frequently asked questions

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/onthego/default.mspx
http://www.mce-components.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Media_Center_Edition
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1741030,00.asp

Buy a copy of Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 OEM