Intel Wakes Up to Portable Devices

Is Intel seeing the Green Light on Large scale volume for portable devices? ARM(Advanced Risc Machines) is the the current leader in the handset areana. The reasson is simple ARM buiness focus is Mips-Per-Watt. The more perfomance for the least power is why so many of phones, pda's, and cameras use ARM chips. This may be changing. With Intel's ability to leverage advance fabs, and putting a dedicated design team, we may finally get a real "PDA sized PC". With good battery life, and with great expansion.

Think of it, with PCI-Express, and USB everything can easliy be jacked into a hand-held cpu package. We can always carry our PC, then lay it into a "dock" and get even better peformance.

Also all our pc applications can run, reasonably unchanged. With a pair of "glasses" with lcd/led's instead of lens we can have virtual 30 inch displays.

The issue comes down to "software". X86 has a legacy of software that goes back 20 years. Everyone is used to this legacy.

Good example, you want Microsoft Messanger, Yahoo Chat, and Skype? Can be done on a pda, but its easier on a laptop. Want Java on a PDA? Very painful. But a "tablet" pc the size of a PDA, with good power consumption(translates low) is far better. Even "enhanced" reality with this setup becomes reasonbly straight forward. Our true "Pocket" PC driving LED/LCD microdisplay, with a array of cameras weaved into our clothing, and dsp processed mikes would let our eyes roam. Add-in GPS and location awareness means that we would never get lost, and would know to the foot where the nearest pizza place is, and what google says about the quality or lack of it. It also means that Microsoft will not choose our fate, as we can also run other OS's on the x86 platform.

Fixing the MBR After Grub Install

What a long day. I am doing a talk at our local LUGS (Singapore Linux Users Group), and its a very straight forward one. Show new users how to install Linux. So of course want to walk thru, and try it out.

Tools:
Knoppix 3.9 Release - For Resizing
OSLoader - The special "Magic"
Ubuntu 5.10 "Brezzy Badger" Release Candidate
Presario 2500 PC Laptop

First, to resize, you want to use either qtparted, or ntfsresize.
The GUI version it the qtparted, and you can run it directly from the desktop.

Be careful, that free space is not to large, the 3.9 version has a older version of ntfsresize, that causes problems if you try to make the partition to large.

So on a 40 gigabyte drive, for dual boot, I'd recommend about 17Gigabytes.

If you want to see more "messages", I would recommend you using the ntfsresize command.

http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html

Is a good FAQ on the status of ntfsresize, so you can see the issues and problems.

Resize, and then reboot with you distro of choice for easy install. Dont forget to select the option to use the freespace you created.

The biggist issue is if you decide to "return" to windows only. Most people would think of just "deleting" the new partitions, and rebooting. Got Cha. The mbr now is pointing to "GRUB" in the partition you just deleted. Machine no long will boot.

So how to "uninstall" GRUB, and return to a native windows machine. You can use the recovery console. Or, better yet, before you delete the Linux partition, you can install OSL2000. This lives nicely in the boot sector, now you can directly boot Win2k. Of course if you want the normal MBR record, with nothing fancy, after installing OSL2000, uninstall it. It will rewrite the MBR nicely.

No fuss, no muss. No WinXP disk needed, and no lost data.