I've been messing around a lot with virtual technologies recently. Partly due to the virtualization technology that we have been using at work, but mostly because its cool and every once in a while I need to run something in Windows and I don't want to reboot on my dual boot laptop.

I ran out of room on my 8gb windows vmware partition. I decided to double the capacity. Easy enough. I've done this before. I'll just run the vmware command:

vmware-vdiskmanager Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk -x 16Gb 

Then I will just boot up from the gparted-clonezilla livecd and expand the NTFS partition.

I updated my old Gentoo server to Ubuntu on Monday. I haven't finished the conversion totally yet, but I'm getting there!

My existing server was setup Gentoo with the following disk setup

/dev/sda1 50mb boot partition with ext2

/dev/sda2 512mb swap

/dev/sda3 250gb / with ext3 (about 60% full)

So I booted up on Gparted Clonezilla to shrink sda3 and create a new 20gb partition for Ubuntu. With Gparted its so easy! Once I had the new partition I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server. The install process is... passable. It was fast, but having to manually choose the drive for grub to install its MBR to (especially when there is only one drive in the server) was a little surprising. I imagine that a first time user of the server install might have a difficult time knowing what to enter unless they have hacked around with Grub's menu.lst file before and understand what (h0,0) means.

The topic of imaging Linux partitions came up at the COD LUG today. I thought I would drop some links to some FLOSS software that can replace much of the functionality of Ghost. In the past I've used Knoppix to run gparted and partimage to backup Windows and Linux partitions. 

Now there is a new bootable Live CD called Gparted-Clonezilla. Its a very small distro that can fit on the business card sized CDs. They also have a script that can convert the iso to a bootable usb key.

I'm going to have to check out the bootable usb key this week. That would be great to have on an old 128mb key for imaging and backing up PC's.