Fun with Windows 7 64bit (II) - Getting XAMPP to work

Mentioned this before, Windows Apache is 32bit strict. Period.

So, how can I overcome the gap this produces in my productivity? Well, no way around a virtual pc installation. The greatly announced XPMode, which is a blend of Virtual PC and RDP, does no good here, as far as I've tested. So, VPC it is. After setting up XP on a virtual machine, I configured the desired apache vhosts and modified the vpc's hosts file accordingly. In order to make a call to those host names from my 64bit system, I also had to touch the win7 hosts file and enter the same host names, but redirect them to the VPC this time. Note that the resolution was a bit fussy - using the VPC's machine name failed, it had to be its IP.

Eventually, one more thing to consider : Where will my document root be? Clearly, the best way would have been putting it on a double-secured NAS, but no such thing is available here =) So I tried two ways:

1) Host Filesystem (Physical), then making this path available to the server to access via VPC Setting. This caused some trouble when the webserver tried to write back the compiled Templates. Probably solvable, but don't feel like trying now.

2) Server Filesystem (Virtual), Sharing the Document Root so that the host system can access it as a Network share. This works like a charm, but one drawback is that in the Eclipse-based Zend IDE linking Source Folders (PHP Explorer->build path->link source) works with local files only. Attaching a Network drive to the share circumvents this. Another drawback is that the files reside in that virtual harddisk and not as files on the physical disk.

This way, I can use my IDE in Win7 64bit and have a webserver on the same machine (sort of). I'd be most gracious if anybody told me that Apache could be run natively (and I don't mean blackdot.be's build) under 64bit Windows 7...

Fun with Windows 7 64bit (I) - Atheros / Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet

I recently installed Win 7 64bit and, guess what, whatever I usually do with my PC won't work. My favourized Sequencer works in 32bit environment only, my Scanner is declared incompatible, I can't even install an official Apache webserver!

Well, worst things first. My network was unsatisfyingly unstable and slow. Copying files from another PC reproducably resulted in a system freeze. Driver update. No freezes, but a performance of 5.x MB / sec, which is, how can I put it, bullshit.

So, the driver that works with my onboard Atheros L1 Gigabit Network card is the one located at the following link: http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?model=M3A&os=25&SLanguage=en-us

The board, besides, is an ASUS P5K.