Hey Scott, Something I've started doing in the past couple of years is using VMWare and making virtual machines for my different development environments. I started this because my computer count got to up to 35 with having to keep different development machines for different customers, projects, processors, programmers, etc. So far it has worked out great for the most part, only real trouble I have had is with Analog Devices Visual DSP not seeing the USB Emulator, but I haven't tried real hard to work through that one yet.
What I did was buy a couple of pretty big IBM servers off EBay and load them up with Centos Linux and VMWare. One of the machines I use to host my various virtual servers, and the other I use to host my virtual development machines. I'm running mostly W2K and WXP virtual machines but have virtual machines for DOS, WFW 3.11 (still used some places) , Vista, W7 and several flavors of Linux. I also bought a pretty good laptop running Vista 64, which sucks but it's powerful enough to run the VMWare and virtual machines quite well, so if I have to go to a costomer's location, I can copy their virtual development machine to my laptop and take off with it. So I seldom use the Vista 64 itself, I just fire up an XP or a W2K virtual machine to do what I need. Makes backing up great too, because you just shut down the virtual machine and then tar the directory that is it's entire hard drive, and it will then be runnable on any other machine that can run VMWare. But I'm getting too long winded talking about it, if you're interested I'll be glad to share the tricks I have found along the way. I have a several year old version of Codewarrior for the Coldfire that I use on it, but I have not tried using the BDM with a virtual machine so I don't know how or if the Freescale debugging hardware will work or not, but I did just get the new version to be able to compile the OT2 source and it seems to work fine for that. What kind of debugging setup do you use for the OpenTrack stuff. I haven't looked at the chip specs yet, does it have the hardware debug port on it? Steve M. WB4BXO http://www.stevemobley.com --- In [email protected], Scott Miller <sc...@...> wrote: > > My workbench PC, which does all of the programming and testing for just > about everything I build, crashed on Thursday. Hard. I had under a > minute's warning that something was going on, long enough to find out > that it'd been quietly dying long enough that backups hadn't been able > to run in a couple of days. > > It looks like the RAM is shot, and the motherboard had a couple of bad > electrolytic caps. In the process of dying it also managed to > thoroughly thrash the operating system (your computer is dying and > you're trying to shut down? Here, just let me install these 16 newly > downloaded patches before I shut off!) , but I think I recovered > everything important. > > No one carries any useful parts locally anymore, so I went out and got a > new machine. Like all new Windows machines, it's pre-installed with > Vista. Which won't run ANYTHING I need it to run. Not a problem, but > it also won't let me install XP. Never gets past the "Setup is > examining your hardware configuration" bit. Tried two different XP CDs > and two different CD ROM drives. I can boot my Ultimate Boot CD and run > a dozen different hard drive utilities, none of which can see the drive, > and most of which just lock up when they try. Tried adding a spare PCI > SATA controller, to no avail. Tried EIDE with another drive, too. > > Any suggestions on getting this thing to run XP? I've been out of the > PC repair business for a long time and I know I'm rusty, but I really > don't know why this thing is giving me so much trouble. > > My backup plan is to rebuild the old machine, which is going to mean > ordering some parts. I really need at least a couple of PCI slots (for > data acquisition boards and such) and a bunch of USB ports - my old > motherboard had an even dozen. I've got an AGP video card that handles > capture from the stereo microscope, but I can replace that if necessary. > Any ideas on where to find an ATX motherboard with a decent number of > PCI slots? > > Scott >
