Save Lono

As the age of the netbook arises; the ability to provision Operating Systems over the network becomes highly useful.  More and more these days, it’s less common to see CD/DVD ROM drives in laptops.  In my particular situation my laptop DVD-ROM drive failed.  This prompted me to embark on journey of sleepless nights, sifting through bad information and countless hours of ‘trial & error’ troubleshooting to make Windows 7 install from PXE boot server.

When I first started this project I had no idea what I was getting into or how difficult and poorly documented the PXE remote installation process is.  I imagined that I would use some kind RAM disk to load an ISO image of a Windows CD.  However, the process to boot an ISO image varies greatly between Operating Systems and Windows versions. So if you plan to install Windows XP or Linux using this tutorial…  you will fail.  This Tutorial is step by step for installing Windows 7(only) from a Fedora 10 provisioning server.  This tutorial assumes you have basic Linux, Windows, and Networking knowledge.

Goals of this post:

- Configure Linux Provisioning Server
- Prepare installation media and installation files
- Boot from PXE to Windows PE 2.0
- Install Windows 7 over Network

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I’ve been using Windows 7(Home Premium) for about a week now… and I gotta say I’m impressed.  It’s interface is almost as nice as Windows XP.  Running multiple programs doesn’t slow game frame rates nearly as bad and the desktop effects are pretty good.  Congratulations Microsoft!  You made a decent OS…  Only took 7 years, thus the name, ‘Windows 7′.  Although this is a huge leap forward there are still many, many problems.

For instance, my Soundblaster Live! Value sound card doesn’t have a driver from Microsoft or Creative Labs!  For God sake, it’s one of the most popular sound cards ever fabricated!  Are you *^&!@ing kidding me!?!?  So I ditched my card and re-enabled my Intel on-board audio.  Windows detected the driver just fine.

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It’s great that the World of Warcraft runs well on recent editions of WINE(Unbuntu/Fedora), but even when using OpenGL the typical Linux user can expect a frame rate reduction from 15%-30% over Windows XP.  However, I must point out that there are many reports of frame rate drops in Windows Vista and Presumably Windows 7(because of virtualization of XP apps).

All this is okay for typical grinding, leveling, and five man instances.  That said,  my GeForce 7950 GTX is only cranking out 30 FPS in low populated zones…  So for the bigger raids, PVP, and highly populated zones like Dalaran it can be frustrating trying to pwn at 12-16 FPS.  In fact my mission is to get at least 40 fps with the graphics card I have.

I was able to improve my frame rate by disabling mods like ‘Questhelper’ in battle grounds.  I added additional RAM to my system.  Although the frame rate boost was negligible; loading times were cut in half. (more…)

I was interested to know if the Windows 7 Beta was bootable in Fedora 10 w/ KVM/libvirt setup.  I was surprised that it was a fairly quick and flawless install.  In fact I was happy to finally see a Microsoft product worth getting excited for.

The install was painless with no driver errors, crashes and just one reboot.  Woot.  Installs faster on Linux hypervisor than an ordinary machine!  Or at least it seemed like it.

So far my overall assesment is that the interface seems to be getting steadily worse since Windows XP, but performence wise it seems waaaaaay faster than Vista.  Also let me point out you can change the Desktop Theme to something that looks XP’ish.

It installed quickly and easily, detected all my drivers and seems to be faster on a limited resources VM then on my Intel 2.6 GHZ Vista system.  We’ll see as I use it further…

My fear is that I’m getting some stripped down Beta that is really fast but gets slower as we get closer to release.  If any of you have experiences you wish to share about Windows 7 and VM’s send me a post!

-Matt