Running Ghost on modern PCs

Existing users of Ghost will be most familiar with the process of creating boot packages using the built in wizard tool. These packages load a version of MS-DOS and the 16 bit Ghost client. Typically they have to be customised for the specific type of network card in the host machine. On some modern PCs, such as Toshiba laptops, the 16 bit Ghost client hangs and cannot be used. I tried every which way to get Ghost to startup on a Satellite Pro S200 recently. I did CDROMs with Universal driver and NIC specific, I did USB key boot and I did PXE with our WDS/RIS server. None of these worked. Ghost would load and never get past the first screen. Eventually I decided it was time to try a 32 bit boot platform and the 32 bit version of Ghost.

One such platform is Windows PE. There may be others but I have not looked as yet. Barts PE is one of the available ways of getting PE capability and they do include a plugin for Ghost. However there were two big issues with BartPE when I set up the CD to boot from. It couldn't detect the Toshie's hard drive and it couldn't load its network card drivers. We have Vista so rather than try to fix up BartsPE I decided to install the Windows Automated Installation Kit and press ahead with Windows PE. That turned out to be a lot simpler to get going than I thought. Even though you have to use a whole lot of new tools, especially with the new WIM image files, getting my USB key set up to boot WinPE was dead easy, and it didn't need any special configuration to recognise the Satellite's HDD or NIC. Off we went with Ghost, and unicasting was not only straightforward, it was also very fast with gigabit NICs in both the PC and the server. Next issue is that Ghostwalker (32 bit) doesn't work on WinPE. So I had to sysprep my source machine before I imaged it. But that was fairly straightforward to do.

The real issue is the license for WinPE. I haven't looked too hard at it yet, but I suspect in reality we can only use it to deploy Vista, not XP. Sometime in the future we probably will be deploying Vista, but will we be using Ghost? My frustrating experience with the 16 bit Ghost has convinced me that Symantec should just forget about the ancient DOS technology and get on the WinPE or some equivalent 32 bit platform. They should get some sort of WinPE license with Ghost so that their customers can be assured of having access to something that works.

Low cost laptops for education

Ever heard of "One Laptop Per Child"? This is an international initiative to deliver affordable, rugged computers to developing nations for children to use. The XO1 laptop has just got into production. The product will naturally be of interest to schools and other educational institutions due to the reduced cost and the design of the product which makes it better able to stand up to wear and tear.

Not to be outdone, Asus Computer has developed and recently released the Eee, its own ultraportable PC with a stripped down hardware spec. This is of considerable interest to me because, for some time, I have wondered if any of the major home appliance manufacturers would move in a similar direction and engineer a simplified laptop as just another kind of appliance, getting its price down to something more affordable for families. Of course, to achieve this, some compromises have to be made. The ideal "appliance PC" (and the laptop is the only realistic form factor) will use USB to add on all the bits like a DVD drive instead of building them in. OLPC and the Eee go a little further than I expected in replacing the traditional HDD with a much smaller amount (typically 2 - 4 GB) of flash memory. Both of these are developing versions of Linux to keep the cost down.

However, most of us will want to see something that can run a commercial OS (such as Windows or the Mac OS), and for that market, Asus is extending the Eee and has obtained support from MS to offer Windows at a special price. The original Eee with Linux is already retailing in NZ at $599. I would hope with educational pricing to get at least the same price with OEM Windows XP, hopefully less. The concept of both the OLPC and Eee seem similar to the Apple eMate that was dropped from production back in 1998. It will be interesting to see if Apple revives the eMate concept in response to the development of the OLPC and Eee products.

For the school environment the easiest way to drop these things into our existing setup is to load Windows XP. Given the small amount of disk space and perhaps only 256 MB of RAM, I would expect to look at an older version of Office (such as XP). Some schools might wish to look into whether thin client (e.g. Terminal Services) is another way of leveraging the reduced capabilities of the Eee. The Eee is the first production implementation of Intel's Classmate PC spec. If other manufacturers follow this trend then school computing might never be the same.

Making Outlook 2007 work on Imap servers

Outlook 2007 has one big improvement above all others if your staff connect to an IMAP server, and that is built-in support for storing Sent messages on that server. This means your users have only one Sent folder that is the same for Outlook, and for any web mail system you may have, that can only access the server's folder rather than Outlook's own Sent Items folder on each desktop's HDD.

One issue that you may need to be aware of is that some Imap servers are configured to place additional folders (other than Inbox) (including Sent) inside the Inbox folder. This means that you need to configure Outlook to recognise that. We are using Courier Imap on Linux and that is how it is set up.

The Imap specific settings are stored in the Account settings for each account as follows (assuming your Sent messages folder is called Sent)

1. Click Tools
2. Click Account Settings
3. Select the account you want to change and press Change
4. Click More Settings...
5. To change the folders path, click on the Advanced tab
6. Under Root folders path fill in Inbox or whatever applies to your setup.
7. Click on OK
8. If you get a message about needing to refresh the folders list, let Outlook do its thing
9. You may then need to requery and subscribe to the Imap folders. To do this, open the folder tree for your Imap account, select the Inbox folder, then go to the Tools menu and click Imap Folders. Make sure you are subscribed to all the folders you need (ideally all of them) including the Sent folder that you need to access.
10. Open up that dialog again (steps 1 to 4)
11. To select the Sent folder, click on the Folders tab. Select the item Choose an existing folder... and browse in the folder tree to the Sent folder. 
12. Click OK.
13. To move the messages from the local folder (Sent Items in Personal Folders) to the server, go to the Sent Items folder in Personal Folders. Select a message in this folder and then press Ctrl+A to select all messages. Right click and choose Move to Folder, then browse to the Sent folder in your Imap folder tree and click OK.

Note: Windows Live Mail also includes Imap support to the same level. However it is not yet stable enough to deploy to end users. You should use Outlook Express 6 instead which is very stable with few problems on Imap systems.