The virus I'd been fighting all weekend seems to have caught up with me: stuffy head, cough, bit of a sore throat, and really nasty headache, sporadic wobbliness. Moderate morning walkies didn't help much.
So, home today, and being basically useless, so I've been attending to sundry IT chores.
Finished setting up a Debian-stable (Squeeze) virtual machine as a stable build environment for some mission-critical firmware. This way, I can archive a copy of the VM along with the release firmware that was built with it, and years form now anyone with a machine capable of running a compatible version of VirtualBox should be able to replicate the binaries. (Well, except for the timestamps.)
Also revisited the Windows XP virtual machine, installed from a generic XP Home CD a while ago, using the magic numbers from my eldest laptop (wherefrom Windows had long since been purged). Will it activate? Yes! And so I downloaded and installed SP3 (necessary before the Windows Update site and IE would even begin to get along), and went through many iterations of updates to get current. Then installed Office 2010 (wouldn't install on the VM from the host DVD drive for some reason, so I had to copy all the files, under Linux, to a shared folder, then run the setup program there), and installed the huge pack of updates for that. Then figured out how to get a decent virtual screen size (install the guest additions, check "auto-resize guest display", and maximize the VirtualBox window). Hey presto! The old klunker I'd been using as an office Windows machine (and which has been in a somewhat disassembled state, out in the hall, of late) is no longer needed... assuming I can get a couple of CAD programs working too.
With all this, and the migration I've been doing the past few days in odd bits of time, I'm pretty near moved into the new workstation. The main remaining item is shuffling all my Firefox bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords, and suchlike over to the new machine.
Coming back to the old workstation to type up a blog post is... eerie. All those virtual desktops with nothing on them but disused shell sessions and file browsers; all the real apps (except Firefox) shut down and now running on the new machine. It's like wandering through the building of a company that's in process of shutting down. Needs an app like "sheep", only with tumbleweeds (the nearest I can find is "amor" set for "spooky ghost").
Anyway: nap time now.
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