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This post is my experience, good and not-so-good, on my first stab into triple booting on a laptop.

Ok, I started with WinXP obviously since the OS always overwrites the MBR entirely and hence a bad choice as a second or third OS. I created one system partition for WinXP OS+apps and one user partition for what we care most about. Both are NTFS. Also, I don’t have any plans to move to Vista in the shorter term also.

Next, I choose to install RHEL5. The reason is that, RHEL5 is a more mature and slow-moving linux distribution and has typical life-cycle of about 2 years between major releases. Compared with this, Ubuntu’s objective is to bring to the end-user latest, greatest software every 6 months. Since I normally move to the latest Ubuntu version by default, I thought having RHEL in first as second OS is a good decision.

So, I installed RHEL with a /boot, /, /home, swap partitions and checked that everything was in order with the root and a normal user accounts. So far, so good…

Now, my first question…
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I know all of you are just recovering from the iPhone launch and desperately waiting for the iPhone to be available near you. For me, I waiting when it will be available in Asia in general and Singapore in particular….

I have started using Mac OS X Tiger recently as a second system and I am mesmerized with the graphics, stability and user friendliness. Now, I wish for something more in OS XI and I have a reasoning why it might be possible as well. Let us first recall some history

1. OS X moved away from a proprieratory kernel to FreeBSD 5.0.
2. iPod entered and revolutionised the then crowded mp3 player market.
3. Apple recently moved its MacBook line from IBM processors to Intel processors.

Now, what could be a ultimate marriage of technologies… and this is my wish as well.

Will apple fork or move its Mac OS to a linux kernel ? and if it does, think about it… the power of the lastest greatest software and the most beautiful and intuitive user interface even built. Now the question is, why didn’t apple choose linux kernel in the first place when they choose FreeBSD5 as their base ?

Could it be GPL ? I don’t think so since apple is currently publishing the modified version of BSD used in Mac OSX as garwin.

So, what is the probability that Apple will do this ? They certainly are capable of doing so as they have demostrated recently through their hardware, software switch in Macbook. I lay my wish here.

What do you think ? do drop some comments below

Now you can ! … read on

I have always had the problem of losing my data in one of my operating systems’ partitions. If you are like me, you know the problem. Simply-stated, I dual-boot [Windows/Linux] every computer I lay my hands on…well, except my servers where there is only Linux always !

I know of atleast two methods to access the linux filesystem data in windows, each with its own pros and cons. If you guys know more ways with superset of features compared to those being offered by these marvellous pieces of code, simple post a comment.

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I was searching for a way to generate assemly codes from C codes for one of my projects.

I was looking for a tool which would create assembly codes from binary codes that were created using a compiler like gcc.

Looks like Life is much simpler. I made the discovery that there is a switch to gcc which directly created assembly codes from C codes.

The switch is -S.
syntax gcc -S program .c and you will get program.s in assembly

I tried the same with arm-linux-gcc, the cross-compiler for arm-architecture and it works there too!

Long live gcc