System setup - Part I

I was away from this blog for quite some time (not only this blog, I was sort of away from internet). In all these months, many things changed around me. Among few not-so-good things happened to me, one good thing happened. I got a new system for myself. Primary target was to built a gaming-cum-development machine (yeah, I am a gamer :D); in which, I can play latest games and setup my development environment as well.

I got the system. But, now problem is - how to setup the system which will perform both of these tasks without much hassle. My plan is something like this.

- Install a single OS in system. Multi-boot is not an option because, system will be on most of the times and restarting it will take unncessary time. Of course, my OS of choice is Windows Vista. But, until I get a copy of Vista, I installed good old XP.

- Make a virtual machine running a multi-purpose linux server. It will be used as Web/Application server, Database server, subversion repository, file server etc. Long term plan is to move this virtual machine into a headless machine (machine which doesn’t have monitor or any i/o devices attached to it); which will run 24×7 eventually. I chose vmware for my virtualization platform. First, my OS of choice was obviously Fedora 10. But, I had to move to Ubuntu Server for technical issues. I’ll talk about it in detail later.

- I cannot afford to run the virtual machine all the time; espically, while gaming. It will take major performance hit. So, virtual machine should be in saved state and should be up and running in no time. I could perform this flawlessly using vmware.

Will come with the details part later.