Windows Server 2008 Core not what I had expected.

I decided to poke around the "Core" mode of Windows Server 2008 RC0 this morning. I had expected the graphical installer to finish, and then to reboot into a command line similar to Linux. Nope. It boots like Windows, but without the shell. So you just see the background and a command prompt window.

The resolution is set at 800x600 at this point. I decide to see if VMware Tools will work. It didn't automatically launch, which I didn't expect it to anyway. I switched to the CD drive and ran it manually:
The install gave me a warning about my help files being out of date or something, so I just hit "No" on that dialog and everything else seemed to work fine, and I rebooted. Then when Windows came back up, I had a 640x480 resolution. Yay. I imagine I could change this through the registry or something but I haven't looked into it too deep.

Next step is to get the network up and running. It's still too new to join to my domain, so I'll skip that part. I used this guide for instruction.

netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces
netsh interface ipv4 set address name="2" source=static address=192.168.1.223 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.1
netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name="2" address=192.168.1.5 index=1
netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name="2" address=192.168.1.6 index=2
netdom renamecomputer %computername% /newname:W2K82

According to the manual, you can use the Core installation for the following:

• Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS)
• Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
• DHCP Server
• DNS Server
• File Services
• Print Services
• Streaming Media Services

As of now we plan to use it for our 2 AD/DNS/DHCP servers, and our file server. It's a pain to setup, but still easier than Linux. And for these services we won't be touching the machines at the console level very much.