www.moka5.com - Feasability and Alternative choices - Comments

Follow-up questions for a multi-boot PC

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 12:32:32 -0700

Dear John, Thx for taking the time to answer everything. However I seem to need a few follow-up clarifications; QQ-1: The 3D-constraint you mention ["at present"] for the Bare Metal Engine (Linux host) alternative, when do you think it will be sorted? QQ-2: Given this limitation, I will need to run the gamers OS in either a virtual machine off a WinXP host - OR, if I may get the BootItNG boot manager to work in combination with the Moka5 linux-based Bare Metal Engine, in a completely separate TinyXP (or similar) OS off its own partition, which would a zinch to set up with the BING boot manager. (i.e. a dual-boot or even a multi-boot PC-system is the goal) However, with the latter separate OS, I believe I would lose the simplicity of being able to launch a virtual machine, stop it, relaunch another etc. without having to reboot the PC... Are you aware of any other alternatives open, present or future, using the Moka5 to run 3D-games, apart from the Windows engine? QQ-3: In the installation guide for the linux-based Bare Metal Engine, there is indeed a dual-boot choice (!!), which seems to be in the direction I am looking. Is it correct that this would require three EXT3 partitions + the one NTFS partition which I previously created for my XP? QQ-4: If so, I exhaust all the 4 primary partition allowed on a single harddrive, right? You say that you have not tried to place one or more of the EXT3 partitions on a separate 2nd disk which thus perhaps seems farfetched for me to experiment with. What about another solution -- would the Moka5 Bare Metal Engine installer be able to find the 3 EXT3 partitions, if they were created as logical volumes inside of an extended partition ?? In an extended partition I can have as many "partitions" as I like, and this solution would use up less number of primaries... QQ-5: Infact, when you write that the Bare Metal Engine will try to autodetect the Windows OS, it would mean that you are indeed talking about a dual-boot case (=my case) where there is another WinXP already on the PC, correct? Could you elaborate on the reasons for the linux-based Bare Metal Engine need to detect the the other Windows? Why would it need to know about another OS at all, other than possibly identifying its partition as one (or one of many) which co- exists on the same harddrive as its own three EXT3 partitions? Do you know if the installation of the linux-based Moka5 Bare Metal Engine requires its own "variety" of a partition-table, or radically would need to alter the MBR which one would set up via e.g. Acronis Disk Director, or even BootItNG software? Any additional warnings here? Any limitation as to multi-boot instead of "merely" dual-boot? QQ-6: Is it actually a limitation of any kind, that the linux- based Bare Metal Engine presupposes that there be no more than its three EXT3 + eventually another SINGLE Windows partition in the dual-boot scenario ? QQ-7: Conversely to placing the three EXT3 partitions in an extended partition, you can actually "bootstrap" a WinXP OS to boot even if placed inside of an extended partition. As it happens, there would in this case be 4 primary partitions i.e. the three EXT3 + 1 Extended partition, holding for instance the WinXP NTFS partitions. Would the Moka5 Bare Metal Engine be able to detect the volumes in the Extended partition, i.e. thus sharing a music library sitting in FAT32-volume therein between WinXP and Moka5 ?? (I'd prefer to place at least 2 EXT3 in the extended however) QQ-8: As a matter of fact, if you have a PC set-up with either additonal internal harddrives, or USB2 or even network drives, will both Moka5 (Windows + Bare Metal) alternatives work in the same manner, in (a) recognizing these other drives (b) mapping them for R/W operations (c) any other purposes which may arise? (important point here is the incremental backup I will need) QQ-9: I often use different RDP-solutions to work with other PC's back & forth on our LAN and outside of it, such as the XP Remote Desktop terminal servers, different flavors of VNC, and 3rd-party offerings such as www.logmein.com which works well even behind routers and firewalls. What limitations, if any, would you foresee? It is one thing sitting inside and looking out (i.e. using RDP from within a virtual machine), and perhaps another altogether if I would need to SSH into a LivePC virtual machine from outside !?! Are there any security issues (sniffing, Remote Desktop password exposed to other if LivePC images are published etc.) ?? QQ-10: In previous post question Q7, I think you misunderstood what I was driving at - I was trying to understand whether a low RAM-situation infact would be a limiting factor just to launch the virtual machine, or conversely, if a low RAM instead would deteriorate the performance after launching a virtual machine?? Thanks once more for your previous input. I hope you can find time to reply to these new questions which arose. Kind rgds, /Per Hagman Stockholm PS. What do you refer to by "anti-cheat" ??

Hello, Lots of good

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 21:23:28 -0700

Hello, Lots of good questions :-). Here's a stab at answering some of them. > Q-1: Is this a feasible strategy ? I've never used BING before so I don't know if it works with Bare Metal. I would be a little bit worried because Bare Metal doesn't know about BING and tries to automatically detect your Windows partition so it may not work correctly. If you have a Windows partition, I would recommend the Windows version of moka5 Engine instead. > Q-2: Will performance suffer if running e.g. Conterstrike in a Virtual Machine ? Performance will be a little slower for 3D applications. Right now only DirectX works and only on Windows, so if you want 3D you will need to use the Windows version. > Q-3: Ibid, for PhotoShop and the like ? There shouldn't be much noticaeable slowdown as long as you have enough RAM in the machine. To run Photoshop in a LivePC you need a minimum of 1GB. 2GB would be preferable. > Q-4: Perhaps XPpro as the host is not the best choice for a low-performance PC ? How low-performance is it? I'm afraid if it is too low-performance you may not have a good experience, especially if you don't have enough RAM. > Q-5: Would it be a better to boot into the stripped-Linux Bare Metal engine, and use XP in a guest virtual machine ? Many people do this, but you cannot currently use 3D acceleration if you do this. > Q-6: Are there any drawbacks/limitations/differences in running a normal, bootable XP vs. WinXP in a virtual machine ??? Some devices are not exposed in a virtual machine, like Firewire. Running in a virtual machine requires more memory. Some "anti-cheat" software will not run in a virtual machine. Otherwise, it should be moreorless equivalent. All the rest your software should work fine. > Q-6: If I stay with the current set-up (i.e. XP as the host), would running a TinyXP in a guest virtual machine be a good alternative for the gaming user ? Yes, but you will need enough RAM to do it. See my answer to Q-3. > Q-7: The Moka5 (just like VM or MS Virtual PC) requires a lot of RAM for paralell virtual machines -- is that a requirement merely to be able to effective run the virtual machines, or is low RAM something which instead deteriorates the performance in each/either virtual machine once up an running ?? For the Windows version, you need at least 350MB above and beyond what the guest OS needs. The Bare Metal is a little less. Adding more RAM will increase the performance even more as the extra RAM can be used for disk caching. > Q-8: As a corollary to Q-7, if I don't have several LivePC but rather only one virtual machine running at a time, would that lower the RAM requirements ? Not really, you'll need at least 1GB to have good performance, more if you want to run more than one LivePC at a time. > Q-9: Can I use the BING boot manager in combination with the Moka5 Bare Metal engine, in such a way that the BING would be installed first, then the Bare Metal engine in its 3 partitions which conceivably would let me boot up the PC via BING into; A) as a default, the Moka5 stripped down Linux+virtual machines B) the alternative WinXPpro which I now have installed "afresh" C) or even the hidden second harddrive's old WinXP I have never tried BING so I'm not sure if it will work or not. You might run into problems because the Bare Metal tries to autodetect the Windows partition. > Q-10: And, if I later need to repartition the drive, go back to the standard MBR (with e.g. 3 primary + 1 extended partition) and/or resize and give partition, do you reckon that both the BING partition-tables and the Moka5 Bare Metal solution will be compatible with e.g. PowerQuest PartitionMagic which has a good graphic interface for partition maintenance, and other imaging and backup solutions such as Ghost and TrueImage etc. (I have a NAS-enclosure on the SOHO-LAN where I'd like to keep backup images -- also of virtual machines) I can't speak for BING, but you can use partition resizing tools to resize Bare Metal partitions. They should support the Bare Metal filesystem (ext3). > Q-11: As a beginner, pls enlighten me on a basic idea; one reason to use virtual machine is that they are insulated from each other (and you may really just take a copy of the file itself to a network disk rather than image a backup, right?), thus stopping hte virtual machine will bring you back to zero where you can restart the virtual machine from scratch, to get rid of any virus, unwanted/crashing programs installed etc.; Well, inversely, if you install a WinXP for long-term usage, there will be new program installs, Microsoft patches etc., which you will want to keep after stopping the virtual machine; How does one go about saving/committing the latter, as opposed to restarting a fresh version of a virtual machine environment without any of the OS modifications of the last VM session ??? You can specify "Keep changes" which will cause the LivePC to remember the changes you have made. The best way is to set up the LivePC exactly the way you want and publish it. Then you can have any number of computers subscribed to that LivePC and they will automatically revert back to that point. > Q-12: Lastly, would it be possible to place one or more of the three Moka5 partitions, required for a Bare Metal installation, on a second harddisk? Either already from start, or by cloning it later? I've never tried this before, but it may work. -John

Feasability and Alternative choices

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 04:24:11 -0700

Hi, I have prepared to install BootItNG (BING) on an old *shared* PC, which has a poor performance for gaming etc. This boot manager allows for multi-booting, disk & partition hiding etc. in a better way than old PQ's PartitionMagic, Acronis DiskDirector et al. Acronis True Image with Universal Restore is however promising for migrating a WinXP installation to a new barebone PC. First I made an image of the installed XPproSP2 120GB harddrive, which resulted in a 96GB Acronis image. Then I installed BING on a proprietary 4MB partition on a new