Windows Express

Although I don’t usually give in to peer pressure (if you forget high school…), this tasty morsel is just too good to pass up. The techie world is ablaze with hype over Google’s announcement yesterday that they will be releasing an operating system, Chrome OS, based on their Chrome browser with a tentative release date for late 2010. I’ve read quite a few blog postings on this the last couple days and I can honestly say that fanboys are out in full force. I’ll link to some of these at the end of the article, as I’ll be pulling some information from them. The biggest questions are: will this have an impact on Microsoft? If so, how big of an impact will it be? Are Google’s claims for a fast, safe operating system likely to be true? My answers are maybe, small, and that depends. I’m going to break down these questions, along with some other Chrome OS topics, as unbiased as I can. And before I start, let me add this disclaimer: I do not claim to be a professional of any kind. I’m simply a soon-to-be-graduated Information Systems major at a major US university who loves to keep an ear to the ground of technology. I love seeing what’s over the horizon and telling people what I think about it. Let’s get started.

Google started as an online search & advertising compnay. That is their niche. They make approximately 97% of their revenue in that area and dominate challengers such as Yahoo & Bing (although Bing is actually becoming a threat) and cast old search engines such as Ask Jeeves into the abyss like Darth Maul. On top of that, they started offering some simple online services such as GMail, which is widely used. Google keeps expanding their service base and now totes office productivity software and mobile phone operating systems which have had minimal impact on the market so far. However, the open source web-based David has challenged Goliath with a full desktop operating system. My Goliath analogy isn’t good enough, however… Microsoft is not the Goliath of non-Mac OSs, it’s the Great White Shark, the Tyrannasaurus Rex, the leviathan of the non-Mac OS. (I say non-Mac because Windows is not a competitor in the Mac world – Mac OS X effectively holds a monopoly on the hardware. Even Macs that have Windows have Mac OS on them. Not fair Apple, not fair. But I digress.)

What Google is doing with Chrome OS is honorable. They realize that people are using the internet more and more. People don’t want to worry about updates, upkeep, or security. They want things to work fast and efficiently. Hopefully Google can deliver with a product that can help in all of these areas. I sincerely hope they do. If they can then it is good for everyone. True competition assures the best products and drives prices down. If I wanted Google to fail I would be an idiot. However, there are some problems with Google’s vision. Here is a short list of what I see:

1. Release date: Late 2010. Are you serious? I know it’s not exactly easy to write code, test, debug, and release an operating system, but this date is way too far away. It’s not even late 2009 yet. How much will technology change from now until then? Google better be looking into a crystal ball. Their timing in regard to other netbook OSs is not very advantageous either. Microsoft is releasing Windows 7 later this month to manufacturers, and the operating system will be officially in the wild on October 22nd. That is a whole year ahead of Google’s anticipated release date, and Windows 7 is so highly touted as a fast, light, stable OS that netbook makers are dumping Windows XP and Linux Ubuntu in favor of Windows 7-only systems. By the time Chrome OS is released Windows 7 will already be on Service Pack 1 and Windows 8 will already be in development. In order for this to be a fair fight Google should have developed this last year instead of giving Microsoft a one-year head start.

2. The target market: Netbooks. Okay. Finally my opinion on netbooks comes out. I will not deny that they have at sometimes appeared attractive to me. Techies like small gadgets. I wanted one… until I looked at the specs. Netbooks are tiny, underpowered (also known as handicapped) laptop computers. One of my professors makes fun of kids in class if they pull out a netbook. The only reason manufacturers are pushing them so hard is because we are in a recession and they have massive margins on plastic one-core laptops with no optical drives. What confuses me is that they are really not that much smaller than other laptop computers. Popular laptop models are around 13 inches while netbooks are around 8. There may only be 1 pound in weight between these.  I sat next to a student in one of my classes who had a netbook. For the record, I have a 15” VAIO. Our backpacks were the same size (you would think he would have his netbook in his pocket or something). I imagine there was a 3-4 pound difference between our computers. But as I was working on my glorious full-sized keyboard with my huge screen, multitasking between the internet, word processing, and image editing, my counterpart was struggling trying to type notes onto his Will Ferrell-sized computer (remember the SNL sketch?). I will gladly lug my bag of bricks around to have more flexibility. I’ll also mention that at my university, which has well over 30,000 students that I assume are all laptop-equipped, I haven’t seen more than a dozen netbooks since their inception. No matter what people say, not everyone is buying a netbook. There are also some statistics on netbooks in one of the blogs I read that mentioned that regular PCs had a 28% decrease in sales over a certain period while netbooks saw a 68% increase. What does this mean? That instead of selling 10,000,000 PCs last year, maybe they only sold 7,500,000. Netbook sales went up from 100,000 to 168,000 though! (These are fake figures inserted for sarcastic comedic value) And one more nugget: Google already has some vendors lined up for Chrome OS. Really smart Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. Go with the OS you have never seen and hasn’t even been developed yet. If Google wanted to make waves with an OS, netbooks are the wrong target market. While it fits their goal (the cloud), it isn’t likely to make an impact.

3. Chrome OS: Fast and secure! Google should make sure they are right before they make claims about speed and security. True, Chrome is fast… but it relies on operating system resource management and hardware performance. Google will have to build a software system ground up that can take advantage of hardware capability and translate that into web app speed. I don’t doubt that they can do it, but they’ve never done it before. And here is the back-breaker on the speed of Chrome OS: even if the OS is the fastest ever, because it is web-centered, it is ALL dependent on connection speed. Also, although it is getting close, the internet is not always available. And when I say available, I mean decent speed. Ever used a 3G connection on a full-blown computer? I don’t know about you, but when I log onto a laptop I expect a certain amount of speed on the internet. When I don’t get it, I get mad. Even pulling mobile-phone designed web pages on a 3G network on an iPhone can be extremely frustrating. Now imagine your entire Windows operating system depending on that connection for email, word processing, system utilities, etc. Pulling your hair out yet? Don’t worry, as long as you are on a Wi-Fi network you will be okay. Hopefully. Another problem is Google’s claims of security on Chrome OS. They are entirely speaking too soon. If Chrome makes any impact on the OS wars at all, hackers will want the trophy of breaking it. I’m sure some 16 year-old in Kazakhstan with a case of Mountain Dew Game Fuel will find some kind of vulnerability in the first few months of Chrome OS’s release. Browsers are historically the most vulnerable part of an operating system, and Google’s programmers are not immune to making mistakes. There will be zero-day vulnerabilities and OS patches, just like any other browser or operating system. “(People) don’t want to… have to worry about constant software updates.” Well said Google. Good luck.

4. Google’s lack of market penetration is a problem. GMail was a hit. I like Google Street View too. Other than that, Google hasn’t really done a great job at getting people to use their products. From what I’ve seen, Google Apps is mainly used by college student group projects where the students have Macs and PCs, have to work on the same document at the same time, and don’t want to bother with conversion of files. They just barely took the “beta” label off of it, and they’re not likely to take over a huge share of the market anytime soon. Android is starting to appear on mobile phones, but almost every other platform has more users, including iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, WebOS on the new Palm Pre, Symbian for Nokia phones, and Blackberry OS. Android is good in that it’s open-source and adaptable, but it just hasn’t been groundbreaking. More phones are being released with Android this year, so stay tuned to that story. The bottom line is that Google needs to learn how to finish. They are brilliant at coming up with innovative products and getting them to beta, but it seems to me that they fail after that. Products that stay in beta for ages, little or no advertising of new products, and slow adoption lead to great products going unnoticed. Even the Chrome browser, which has proven to be the fastest in correctly loading webpages and killing others in JavaScript speed tests, is 4th in the browser race. Fourth. Behind three others. Three slower browsers. One of which is the ridiculed Internet Explorer that fails Acid tests. If that is not a product failure then I don’t know what the term means. IE is sold through Windows, FireFox has been around long enough that it sells itself, and Apple ads and media hype sell Safari. DO SOMETHING GOOGLE! There is also some criticism from one of the linked articles that Google uses their most brilliant programmers and project managers to start up and launch a product, and then they move on to the next “it” thing. If they expect to make Chrome OS a winner they must start from the beginning with their best staff until it has beaten every other netbook OS out there. Another HUGE problem here is familiarity. Even if Chrome OS is better than Windows 7, how many people will go with the unfamiliar interface?

Now let me state it again: I have nothing against Google. I have a GMail account, I use Google search occasionally (Bing is my default), Google Maps helps me from getting lost, and I use Google Docs at school. I love competition; it’s in everyone’s best interests. But some of Google’s decisions are interesting to say the least. What do you think? Should a supposedly groundbreaking OS be released on a type of machine that the minority has in their possession? Should it be Linux, which for years has ridden in the backseat as the third wheel while Windows drives around the prom queen? Should they make claims of speed and security before any code has been written, in contrast to Apple and Microsoft’s moves of saying nothing but “We might be working on something,” and then making a press release when they have something to show? Is Google going to end their losing streak with Chrome OS and finally bring their application bundle into the forefront? Will Batman and Robin finally defeat the Penguin and his cronies? So far everything is just speculation, but hopefully we will see a shred of something before the spring.

As promised, here is some good reading on Chrome OS:
Official Google Blog Entry
Will Google’s OS Make the Desktop Safe?
Google Chrome OS Will Reshape Desktop Landscape
Google: The World’s Most Successful Failure?
Google Announces Chrome OS Tech Partners

There’s been a lot of hubbub and fanboyism recently over the release of the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone OS 3.0 software. I know loads of people who own iPhones, including a very good techie friend of mine and my brother (okay okay he only has an iPod touch, but big deal). I’ve used iPhones and their software.  And to be quite frank, I’m not that impressed! Some people say I’m a hater, and I readily dispute that. I love the hardware design in Apple products. I wish every phone and laptop could look like an Apple.  I also love how the software integrates perfectly with the hardware, and how applications run so smooth. But I also realize that when you make both the hardware and software things tend to work like that.

I am a proud owner of a Windows Phone. For a Christmas/birthday present my wife bought me an HTC Touch Pro (or AT&T Fuze, however you look at it). Let me tell you why I love it.  This way, I know that everybody who reads this article and buys an iPhone did it because they knew the differences and made a decision and didn’t just do it because it “looked cool” or saw a stupid commercial (I enjoy watching them however).

Reason #1: “Freeeeeeedoooooom!”

Yes, I’m quoting William Wallace. Apple has put the King Edward iron fist around their baby the iPhone, and everyone knows about it. You don’t like something about the OS? Too bad. Maybe in 6 months a firmware upgrade will fix it. Or maybe iPhone OS 4.0 will. My HTC came with an AT&T modded version of Windows Mobile 6.1 with a skin on top called TouchFLO 3D that was supposed to make it more finger-friendly.  It also came with a host of apps from AT&T (I call it crapware or bloatware), and like a new Dell, it was dreadfully slow. Did I wait for an AT&T upgrade? Did I take the phone back? No way! I searched the web, found my new friends on Fuze Mobility and XDA Developers, and downloaded and flashed a new operating system, or ROM, right to my phone. Problem solved! The entire device was so responsive after that, and I didn’t have anything on it that I wasn’t going to use. Since then I have upgraded my phone to Windows Mobile 6.5,

An HTC Touch Diamond II running Windows Mobile 6.5

which in my opinion rocks (I’ll write a review on it eventually). Can an iPhone do that? There are stories of jailbreaking iPhones, unlocking them, etc., but can you modify the OS freely and make the phone work for you by eliminating system components or default apps? Not the way a Windows phone can. (P.S. There are also stories of Apple breaking jailbreakers… not cool Apple, not cool) Just as a last example, today I stopped liking the default touch keyboard the phone has. I kept typing the wrong letter! (I’m sure anyone with an iPhone has done this before) So what did I do? I browsed the web and found a new keyboard program, fingerkeyboard. It installed in seconds and now I don’t even use the hardware keyboard unless I’m typing a long email.

Reason #2: Variety Is the Spice of Life

Let’s say you go to an AT&T or Apple store. What are your choices for an iPhone? Well, it’s a candy-bar-type style, there’s white, black, 3G, 3GS, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB. They all have a 320×480 capacitive touchscreen, they all have a camera, they all are almost exactly the same. Now check out the variety of Windows phones on the market. Some have capacitive screens, others resistive, there are candy bars, sliders, OLED displays, Wi-Fi, accelerometers, Bluetooth 2.1, hardware keyboards, microSD card slots, 720p video recording, 8MP cameras – take your pick! Personally, my phone has a 480×640 touchscreen (yes, it has as many horizontal pixels as Apple has vertical… on their newest device), Wi-Fi, hardware keyboard, a 3.2MP camera that also records video, FM radio, to name a few features. Apple is brilliant in that they offer only a few models of the iPhone, thus driving up their margins. But is that what people want? Heck, some Windows phones don’t even have a touchscreen (for those technically-challenged people). The bottom line is – if you want a smartphone, you can find one that fits exactly what you want and runs Windows Mobile. And oh yeah… if you want the iPhone, have fun with AT&T.

Reason #3: Anything You Can Do I Can Do… Just As Well If Not Better

Did you forget to shower this morning? There’s an app for that. Do you need to see exactly where your friends are from space? There’s an app for that too. Do you want to know what an iPhone can do that a Windows Phone can’t? There is NOT an app for that. Why? Because there is an active Windows Mobile developer community that has been active for years, cranking out great applications that sometimes preclude the more famous iPhone apps. GPS, widgets, Skype, games; if you can name it Windows Mobile has it. Also, Microsoft will soon launch their Windows Marketplace app store, making all of these applications available from one place (some people estimate the number of Windows Mobile apps at around 20,000). Windows Phones also rival Apple’s MobileMe service, which can sync text messages, contacts, and appointments (among other things) from your iPhone to a personal account on the internet.  This is very handy if your phone is lost or stolen.  You don’t have to lose everything!  However, MobileMe charges about $100 a year for this service. Microsoft has recently launched an advanced beta of their MyPhone service, which accomplishes the exact same thing – at no price to the user. So although the iPhone has 50,000 apps and however many downloads from the App Store, Windows Phones are right behind and just as competitive.

Reason #4: Can your iPhone Do This?

I am completely bewildered that the iPhone lacks some completely reasonable and noteworthy features. It almost seems to me that they purposefully released an underperforming product and are slowly adding features that should have been there in the first place, charging customers for an entirely new product every time they upgrade the features. The first iPhone lacked 3G. What? The technology wasn’t even new! Almost all current Windows Phones at that time, even on AT&T, had 3G capability (see AT&T 8525). The iPhone 3G had a weak camera with no video recording. The new iPhone 3GS is just barely getting a 3MP camera with video recording. Check out this site and we’ll talk about the “new features.” Windows Mobile has had cut & paste and voice command as long as I can remember. Windows Phones have had 3MP cameras since mid-2008. Windows Mobile 6.5 has built-in stock widget and voice notes apps and has a dedicated YouTube app available for download. Internet tethering has been available for over a year on AT&T with Windows Phones. They all have MMS capability. The point is, Windows Phones have been doing this for YEARS. Apple is just now making it available and charging $299 plus a 2-year contract for something you should have had 2 years ago. In addition, here are some tricks the iPhone has yet to learn. Multi-tasking. Apple claims the battery will drain too fast. Hmm… sounds like a bad battery to me. On my Touch Pro I can surf the net, listen to music, take notes in Microsoft Word or OneNote, play Solitaire or another game, check my stocks, and text, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. My battery will still last all day. Windows Phones have a file system with a familiar Windows registry. All Windows phones work like a Windows computer. There is an internal flash hard drive that contains system files and a registry. You can have a My Documents folder packed with Word, PowerPoint, PDF, or Excel documents from work or school, and even edit Windows settings in the registry. If I want the backlight to turn off after so many milliseconds of inactivity, I can do that. I like that kind of access. That’s just a small list of things Windows Phones have been doing for ages, and the iPhone STILL can’t do at least two of them.

So that’s my two cents on the iPhone.  I can go on for a lot longer, but I’d rather not. Let me say this again: I love the iPhone. I love how it looks, feels, and works. When it was first released it revolutionized smartphones with its touchscreen, accelerometer, smooth touch user interface (UI), and “real” browser. But I love my phone more, and everyone else has caught up to and even surpassed the iPhone. They all have large high-resolution touchscreens, a slick touch UI, a sharp camera with video capture, accelerometers, app stores, a fast full browsing experience, and you can get one however you like on whatever provider you like. So the ball is in your court Apple: you’ve revolutionized smartphones once and now it’s your turn to do it again. Don’t come back until you at least have HD video capture, multitasking, a better screen, and a file system to organize documents. And really, get rid of AT&T.

I have quite the busy week ahead of me.  Tonight is my night to cook dinner. I still need to upgrade my laptop to the Windows 7 RC (which I downloaded a week ago) from Build 7077.  I need to reinstall Windows Mobile Device Center and sync my smartphone.  After that I need to build a new Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM for my phone and flash it.  On Monday my summer semester starts, and I’m still working full-time while taking 18 credits.  The joy of being a college student *sigh*.  Then, and ONLY then, I’m going to start my freeware reviews - breaking freeware into different categories and trying out all of them.  After that I’ll tell you which ones are worth it!  Check out this thread over at Windows Guides Forums to see which programs I’m going to test out and give me some more suggestions.  I’m going to get back to work now, but I’ll catch you in a few days!

Sorry it has been such a long time.  However, now finals are over and I actually have some time to compile a couple postings. 

Last week I got OS X to work on my PC.  I browsed the torrent sites and found a certain .iso image called iPC 10.5.6 or something like that.  It has tremendous amounts of driver support included.  After going through the installation, I booted up from the DVD one more time, hit F8 to bring up the command prompt and entered rd=disk0s3 to boot through the DVD to the OS X partition.  After the initial bootup and setup completed I can now successfully boot into OS X anytime from my hard drive.  Not too shabby!  The only thing on my computer that doesn’t work in OS X (that I would use – I’m not including my media card or Expresscard slots) is my wireless internet.  But that’s kind of a big deal for me.

Here is my initial take on OS X-

• It’s wicked easy to use.  No wonder MacBooks are the computer of choice for 18-year old college girls nationwide
• It looks great!  I love the backgrounds, it really shines on my no-glare screen, and it appears very polished.
• The dock is good-kind of.  I wish there were more ways to customize it, and the new Windows 7 taskbar kind of blows it away when switching between programs.  Hint, hint Apple.
• It’s fast.  Period.
• And I like the search feature.  It beats Windows by a small margin.

So it works!  If you want to know how to set up a triple-boot or double-boot system read these tutorials and then shoot me an e-mail with any questions.  I’d be glad to help.

Sorry it has taken so long to post on my progress for the triple boot project.  I have run into some snags on the next step – installing Mac OS X.  So, in the words of Ignacio from Nacho Libre – “Let’s get down to the nitty gritty…”

So now I have Linux Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows 7 installed on seperate partitions in a dual-boot environment using the GRUB boot loader from Linux.  It works great!  My first step after this was to locate an .iso file from which to make a boot disk for OSX.  If you browse your native torrent site or visit Neo from The Matrix you will soon have a copy of one of the several distributions of OSX86, the name given to an OSX installation disk with patches added to run on a normal X86 PC.  The two I found were iDeneb v1.4 10.5.6 and Kalyway 10.5.2.  iDeneb is the newer version, obviously, so that was my first choice to install. You can find installation insructions on the OSX86 project wiki. Go to Their Website and browse around.

After burning the disc I restarted my computer (make sure to set the BIOS to boot from DVD first) and the installation took off.  It takes a long time for the installation menu to pop up, but everything related to the installation went just fine.  Select your native language and continue to the next screen.  From here you can use the “Disk Utility” function from the Utilities tab at the top of the screen and format the partition of your choosing into a Mac Extended Journal format.  Continue to the next screen and select that partition for the installation.  Continue.

Here is the hard part. You MUST select “customize” before installing and check all of the packages that correspond to your hardware.  This is where the problems begin.  It takes a lot of trial and error, but if you get everything right the installation should work after the reboot.  After selecting everything continue on with the installation.  The installer will check the DVD for errors and then install OSX.  After it is complete (about 10 minutes on my machine) it will reboot.  After your BIOS screen it should boot into Darwin, OSX’s bootlader.  From here, if you press F8, you can type a number of things into the command line to try and get the installation to work.

• -F=Something about switching driver loading, so if you have installed the wrong patch it may skip it and still load correctly.
• -V=Verbose mode, which lists the commands on the screen instead of showing the Apple logo with a spinning wheel.  Useful to see where problems arise if they do.
• -X=Safe mode
• platform=X86PC – Tells the bootlader that your computer isn’t a Mac basically.  Has solved some people’s problems.
• rd=diskXsY tells OSX where to boot from, where X is the Hard Drive number (usually 0) and Y is the partition number on the drive.  You can see this on the Darwin bootloader screen where it will usually look something like this:

   Windows partition (0,1)
   OSX86 (0,3)

Anyways, my installations so far have gotten hung with an error message saying “Still waiting for root device.”  I have tried a number of configurations and will try the Kalyway disk as well.  After that I’ll post an update.

By the way, this will wipe out the Windows bootloader.  If you want to replace it I figured out a very easy way.

1. Open the start menu, type “cmd”, and hit enter to open the command prompt.
2. Type “diskpart” and hit enter to open the disk partition tool.
3. Type “list disk” and hit enter to show all the hard disks.
4. Type “select disk X” and hit enter, where disk X is the hard disk your Windows partition is.
5. Type “list partition” and hit enter to show all the partitions on disk X.
6. Type “select parition X” and hit enter, where partition X is your Windows partition.
7. Type “active” and hit enter. This marks your Windows partition as the active one during booting.
8. Type “exit” and hit enter. Close the command prompt.

After you reboot your computer the Windows boot manager should be back in effect and you won’t have to deal with Darwin anymore. Just a little something I picked up that is useful.  You can also do this to mark y0ur OSX partition as active to bring back the Darwin bootloader.  I’m assuming the same for Linux as well with GRUB.

Sorry for the ridiculously long post; this isn’t a short process.  Stay tuned because later I will post my results for the ongoing triple boot project, along with reviews of some freeware (idea courtesy of Rich from Mintywhite) and some other posts.

My Initial Thoughts On Ubuntu

Today I started my triple boot project by installing Linux Ubuntu 8.10. I first used Windows 7’s disk management tool (by right clicking on “Computer” on the start menu and selecting “Manage”) to create 2 new partitions for the new operating systems and formatting them as FAT32 file systems. I then rebooted my computer with the bootup DVD in the drive, created from an .iso file. (Burning a disc image is simple in Windows 7 – no software is needed, just navigate to the .iso file, right click, and select “Open With >” and select the disc image tool)

Setup of Ubuntu was simple. I chose the 7 GB partition and formatted it as an EXT3 file system, and it installed in about 10 minutes without a hitch. In addition, it even added Windows 7 to its own GRUB boot loader, giving me the option to dual-boot with no action required on my part.

At first glance I was very impressed with Ubuntu. Its driver support is incredible-It needed no hardware configuration at all, and when it booted up I saw a clean desktop in my laptop’s native resolution (1280×800). There are fun little graphic features like docking a window on a side of the desktop and having to pull it – like a wad of goo – off of the edge.  The windows even bend when you pull them across the screen.

The Ubuntu desktop, "stretching" a window to pull it off the edge

I was using a USB mouse from startup and Ubuntu told me how much mouse battery was left – something Windows won’t even do without extra bloatware, and it even had a list of available wireless networks for me which I connected to effortlessly. No Windows update, no “found new hardware – installing drivers” message or anything. After connecting my iPod, a program called [Music Player] (clever) popped up and listed my entire music library and works just like iTunes.  I’m liking this!

Now – the drawbacks. I’m not that impressed by the User Interface. It is very clean, but doesn’t seem to “pop” at all. In my opinion the Windows XP desktop looks better, and I got sick of that in 2007 when I made the transition to Vista. Windows 7 has a much better UI than Vista even, so using the default gross-brown Ubuntu desktop is like going back to Windows 98 for me. Also, it doesn’t seem as “Intrepid” as the name implies. (Ubuntu 8.10’s nickname is “Intrepid Ibex”) Even opening the menus on the top bar was about the same speed as opening the Start Menu in Windows. This was very surprising to me because Ubuntu requires half the system resources of Windows 7 yet seems to move at the same pace. If my math is correct…. it’s supposed to be twice as fast!

I’m leaving a spot in my heart (for the taking) for Ubuntu, so I’m not kicking it to the curb yet. As soon as I try to work in Ubuntu I’ll let everyone know how I like it – inside AND out (this was just the outside).

Stay tuned! Later this week I will attempt the Mac OSX86 installation with troubleshooting tips and screenshots as I continue my “Triple Boot Goodness” project/tutorial.

After reading a ZDNet blog posting today, I’m afraid to say that I have been inspired.  Apparently Dell Mini 9 owners have managed to install Mac OS X from a legitimate DVD with the only extra step being a simple bootloading program installation.  The best thing is that all of the Dell’s hardware is supported, and it runs very quickly, practically making it an Apple netbook.

Being an Information Systems major I need experience working with several different platforms/operating systems.  I have been thinking about triple-booting for quite some time and have now come to the conclusion that I MUST undertake this project and post my progress on this blog.

I am currently running Windows 7 build 7077 as my main operating system, and in addition to that I will be adding Ubuntu 8.10 (a Linux distribution or distro for all the Linux newbies)  and some version of Mac OS X.  If you check out the OSx86 Project you will see that some very kind experts are helping to make OS X accessible to PC users, although there may be some hardware problems (which I expect).

So stay tuned!  I should be starting this project later in the week and will post back with screenshots, how-tos, and problems that I run into on this epic journey.

Disclaimer: Installing Mac OS X on any computer that is not “Apple-labeled” is against Apple’s End User Licence Agreement.  I do not plan on using Mac OS X as an operating system, I am just curious to see if it is possible on my machine

Welcome to Windows Express!  Let me know what YOU would like to hear about first.  I have a few projects in the works, including a review of the official Windows 7 Release Candidate sometime next month and a review of a pre-beta leak of Windows Mobile 6.5 running on my HTC Touch Pro (complete with screenshots and video of it in use). 

Any other ideas are greatly appreciated and if I like your idea enough, it just may end up here!  So get to commenting and I will do my best to get this blog roaring along.  Thanks everyone and welcome!