walls

That didn't last long, the new computer got (literally) stuck inside a wall by the second day, which reduced the noise level to enough to not bother me during the day. I need to add some noise blocking stuff inside the wall to get it low enough for me to tolerate at night. I'm so broken when it comes to environmental noise, oh well.

Anyway, this ended up with the bits of the computer that arn't in the wall occupying parts of the bookshelf next to it, which is kinda neat. I especially like the flat panel monitor up on my bookshelf. Since I don't use the monitor for anything most of the time, I set it up to be a slowly changing slide show. Always something new and interesting from my photo library when I look over there.

I spent a long time today installing vmware on the new computer, which was so annoyingly proprietary. It's amazing what people put up with, with hard to navigate websites, cryptic installation instructions, binary patches to fix stupid bugs, and then a whole layer of license key fun on top of it. With vmware you even get the fun of upgrading your license keys independant of the software. Once installed it is a lot faster than qemu though, so I put up with it.

For some reason, I then decided to install the Windows CD that came with the computer in a vmware instance running on it, which meant I got to go through the whole crazy installer and license key rigamarole a second time. It takes more keystrokes to enter a windows license key than it takes to do a complete Debian desktop install! Amazing. And they use a font that makes Q and O and 0 and D all look like the same letter without a magnifying glass, so you might get to enter that key three or four times before you get it right.

The plan is to keep that snapshot of an installed windows system and use it to make sure d-i does appropriate things when confronted with a system running windows. Anyway, d-i runs nicely on the new vmware system, with a first stage install taking less than ten minutes. I've already found and fixed more d-i bugs today than I had in the last week or so, thanks to the improved environment.