Started the process of building the new PC using 64-bit Ubuntu installed by Greg. In the proprietary AMD driver, it seems impossible to specify portrait orientation for dual monitors, so I'm living with landscape for the moment; because of that, I've also switched my old Windows install back to landscape so a ported VM is more likely to work. Downloaded and installed VMWare Converter to convert the old Windows install to a VM on an attached USB disk. The first few tries failed at 2%, so I then went through all the running processes and turned off the firewall and AV checker (after disconnecting the network cable), as well as any processed initiated by VMWare, which is installed on the Windows box. After that, the process seemed to get going, although after 20 minutes it['s still showing 1%, so it may be failing after all. I'll have to let it run overnight to see.

On the new box, I installed OpenOffice 3 from downloaded 64-bit debs, alongside 2.4; and I also installed Midori (to get WebKit), and Opera (which is available in 64-bit). I copied over my Thunderbird profile, and that's working fine; I also started the process of downloading all my working data off Rutabaga. That's trundling along happily (in fact, very fast indeed). I have oXygen running, and I've installed NetBeans, although I haven't run it yet; I want to bring down my NetBeans project files first, and point it at them.

Sunbird is proving problematic, because the repo version is older than the version I've been using on Windows, Pulling the latest off the Mozilla site gives me the right version, but I can't get the data into it just by copy/pasting from my old profile, so I'm going to have to do an export/import via an ICS file to get the data across, once the virtualizing process has finished.