VMworld 2009 Arrival

Finally in my hotel room after travelling to Cannes from Brussels, which was about an hours worth of smooth uneventful flight.




Couldn't help myself to have the above picture taken. Cannes after all is host to the famous film festival every year (in fact in the very same venue as VMworld is being held in), so the link with the film industry is almost inescapable even. There are even tiles with the handprints of movie stars just outside the venue!





A quick snapshot of the the view from the "Croissette" in Cannes on our way to the venue to get ourselves registered today so we beat the crowds in the morning.



The registration counters divyed up per type of attendee. The registration process was fairly smooth and with the obligatory laptop bag filled with conference material.

Then we went off and had ourselves a decent meal with an interesting homemade Ice Tea, which not only tasted good, but looked good too.




To get an idea of Cannes architecture two intersting buildings on the way back to the hotel.
The last one being host to the Benelux party coming Tuesday eve.

A new way of blogposting

So I finally found a blog app for the iPhone that has the functionality I want (creating posts with pictures). So here is a shot of Egypt, Luxor along the river Nile, shot from a balloon.



It is supposed to be wysiwyg too. The name of the app is blogpress. I'll be sure to put my findings on it here.
Will be putting it to good use at VMworld 2009 next week.

Windows 7/Vista Dual Boot with Linux; how to make it work again after you installed Windows.

I recently installed Windows 7 on my Desktop PC. I was cautious and installed it on a partition that I hardly used and had sufficient room on it. The idea was to triple boot with Vista and Linux (gOS a Ubuntu derivative).
However, after Windows 7 had installed, it was only nice enough to give the option of booting either Vista or 7. The Linux OS was completely ignored. In hindsight I should have checked on this because the web is abundant with warning about this. However, I did not have a choice anyway and in the end it was relatively easy to recover from this situation, with bits n pieces of info found on a number of blogs. Ok, so without further ado, here is the fix for prosperity:

First we'll need to make sure GRUB is installed onto the Linux partition itself.

1. Boot with a Linux Live CD (or a normal linux install CD and use the rescue mode)
2. Open a terminal window and enter "sudo grub"
3. At the grub prompt, enter "root (hd0,2)". Now 0 is the harddisk nr and 2 the partition on that HD, so you need to make sure that is right in your case. You can check this from within either windows (diskpart) or in linux (fdisk).
4. Then at the grub promt, enter "setup (hd0,2)". note that this may give an error in the last stage, something about Reiser FS. If you enter the command once more (arrow up), it will work tho. This seems to be a long time bug...
5. Now enter "quit" to exit grub
   

Ok now this done, you can boot with Windows (Vista or 7) again and we're going to first make a copy of the boot sector on the Linux partition. In order to do this we'll need the program dd for windows (easily found through a google search). Or dd for Linux because the latest version available for Windows no longer runs on Windows 7 RTM.

1. Open a cmd prompt and enter "dd --list". This will show you you a list of all partitions. You'll need to match up the \\?\DeviceHardDiskXPartitionX with the \\?\DeviceHardDiskVolumeX. If you do this on Linux of course the usual /dev/sda[nr.] notation needs to be used.
   
2. Now enter "dd if=\\?\DeviceHardDiskVolume2 of=linux.boot bs= 512 count=1" (this is based on my partitioning scheme, check yours). This will create the linux.boot file (you can name it whatever you like of course).
3. Now copy the linux.boot file (or whatever you called it) to the root of C:
4. Now enter the following command "bcdedit /create /d "Linux" /application BOOTSECTOR”.
   It will say it created an entry with a name such as {3eaa81f2-e508-11dd-9049-806e6f6e6963}
5. Next enter "bcdedit /set {3eaa81f2-e508-11dd-9049-806e6f6e6963} device boot". Make you enter your particular identifier here.
6. Next enter "bcdedit /set {3eaa81f2-e508-11dd-9049-806e6f6e6963} PATH linux.boot".
7. Next enter "bcdedit /displayorder {3eaa81f2-e508-11dd-9049-806e6f6e6963} /addlast".
8. Finally enter "bcdedit /timeout 10". Or whatever you feel is appropriate in terms of timeout value.

Now next time you reboot Linux is the last option in the Windows boot menu.