Maintenance

I'm documenting a process I undertook at home to attempt to move a Windows XP virtual machine from running under Parallels (v2) on OSX to runnning under VirtualBox on Linux (Ubuntu 9.04).

I started out by following these excellent instructions, which tool me through these steps:

• Clean up the VM as much as possible (removing cruft, old apps, temp files, etc.)
• Create a new virtual HD and attach it to the VM (this was just in case the network connection was lost in the next step, to give the VM somewhere to save to outside of its regular HD, which would be imaged; in the event, this turned out not to be necessary, because network connectivity was not lost).
• Downloaded and installed VMWare Converter.
• Downloaded and ran MergeIDE.
• Uninstalled Parallel Tools and rebooted.
• Turned off as many services as I could (including the Java update service and the QuickBooks update service).
• Backed everything up.
• Ran the VMWare Converter to create an image of the C drive, saved onto the second virtual HD.

This seemed to go fine, giving me a .vmdk and a .vmx file, the former being the HD image, at about 20 GB in size. I moved these onto my network server, then reinstalled Parallel Tools on the VM and confirmed that it was still working OK.

Then:

• Copied the two files down to my Linux box.
• Added the new HD to the Virtual Media Manager in VirtualBox.
• Created a new VM using this HD.
• Booted it.
• Got an instant blue-screen, which then disappeared too quickly for me to read it.

I then spent a lot of time trying various options in the VM setup in VirtualBox -- there are lots of variables which might prevent a VM from booting if you get them wrong -- but the bottom line was that the machine wouldn't boot. So:

• Attached an ISO of a Windows CD disk to the machine, and booted from that.
• I was able to log on to the HD Windows setup, and took the step of renaming prlfs.sys, mentioned in the blog posting linked above. That didn't help.
• Ran chkdsk /r on the virtual HD; this found and fixed a couple of errors, but that didn't help either.
• Finally decided to do a "repair install" of Windows. This worked; the VM came up, with all the programs and settings intact, but obviously requiring many updates.
• Did the first batch of updates (59 in all).
• On reboot, there was some glitchy behaviour; at regular intervals svchost.exe would crash.
• Installed the VirtualBox guest additions, and added a second, faster NIC. The svchost.exe crashes seemed to disappear after this.
• Tried to do more Windows updates, but was blocked by the requirement to Activate Windows. I don't want to do this right now, because that will mean I can no longer use the other VM (still in Parallels), and I don't yet know for sure that the new VM is solid enough to be relied upon. I'm running Half-Baked off the VM, and Stewart's away right now so there's no fallback if I screw it up, so I'll probably wait until he's back, and takes the company over in June, before I go the whole way and activate the new VM, abandoning the old.

Spent most of the day so far re-arranging B045.
I've removed the old mac and PC and moved the furniture around, set up the iMac and de-cluttered a fair bit.
The new machine is called braeburn and it's bound to the OU.

Did the dist-upgrade to Jaunty, which I've been putting off because nothing was actually broken; but as soon as it rebooted from the upgrade, things WERE broken. What had happened was that the upgrade had installed the fglrx driver for the graphics chip, and that driver is broken (at least with my mobo/gpu). The result was that I couldn't even get a login screen; the display was completely borked. Found instructions here on what to do:

  sudo /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh  # (if it exists)
  sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx*
  sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
  sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
  sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
  dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

However, I was unable to do this because I'd neglected to set the root user password on my machine (I don't usually enable root); and when I booted to the recovery console, the only command-line options available to me demanded a root login. However, Greg found a solution to this:

• Boot to grub menu. Select the first line (normal boot).
• Press e to edit; then select the kernel line and press e to edit again.
• Delete back to "ro", including the "ro".
• Add rw init=/bin/bash.
• Press Enter, then b to boot the system.

At this point, you should have a root console; however, mine had frozen up due to some USB problems, which were caused by the USB hub in the monitor being connected. Disconnected this, and found a PS2 keyboard, then went through the process again, and finally got a root console. Then I was able to do these two things:

  sudo /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh  # (if it exists)
  sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx*

Although the first file didn't exist, so it wasn't necessary. Then rebooted, and got a login screen in an almost normal way. Then I ran the rest of the instructions at the top to remove and reinstall the ati and xorg stuff.

After that, I ended up in the same position I'd been in after the initial Intrepid install, with only one monitor detected, mirrored on both screens. Followed my own instructions from this blog to fix it:

• Disconnect the smaller monitor leaving only the bigger one plugged in, and reboot.
• Ubuntu correctly detects the new monitor, and configures its resolution correctly. Set the refresh rate if necessary in the Screen Resolution applet.
• Hot-plug the old monitor, then do Detect Displays in the Screen Res applet. It will detect the smaller monitor correctly, but shows it as "Off"; Select "On".
• The applet will ask for permission to change some settings (presumably writing to xorg.conf). Agree and authenticate.
• Reboot, or restart X, and the two monitors will now work happily together.

Microsoft released the Windows 7 RC for general testing this morning, so I got copies of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and built a VM in VirtualBox, to get some familiarity with it, and to test out some of our software. All seems pretty similar to earlier versions of Windows, although the installer is a bit slicker. The registry is all familiar, and the folder structures look like Vista. I tested two of our apps and found no problems at all. The most important tests will be on the developing versions (Transformer 3 and the Apparatus application), which will be released closer to Windows 7's final release in the fall; they need to be solidly tested on it.

I had cause to build a static page of links from a directory listing, and used Text Wrangler and grep to do it.

From an initial directory listing I got a bunch of stuff that looked like this:
link-01.html
url_03.html
href9.html

I'm sure there's a one-pass method for this, but I did it in two.
First pass: prepend text with <a href="
Second pass:
Find (^.*")(.*)(\.html)
Replace with \1\2\3">\2</a>
Receive <a href="link-01.html>link-01.html</a>

Got some funds to buy an iMac. This machine will replace both Braeburn (video Mac) and Dandelion (audio PC), allowing us to compact the space taken up by those workstations. Made the purchase today. ETA is 10 days or so.

I'm delaying the purchase of FCP Studio and Aperture until after the WWDC in June (changes are apparently in store for both apps).

I'm in the process of figuring out whether it's practical to do basic video editing on my Ubuntu machine. We have to record some video for another purpose, so we've taken the opportunity to see what the state of video editing is on 64-bit Ubuntu.

Recording video is straightforward on the camera, but the audio quality is problematic. We should be able to use an external microphone, but to do that we also need to hook up the condenser mic to one of the mic pres (to get the phantom power), then hook that up through an adapter to get a one-eighth TRS plug that will go into the camera. We haven't got through all that process yet.

Getting video off the camera is easy; the camera mounts as a drive, and the video is just an MP4 file. Getting the MP4 file into DV can be done using Kino, but that's about all Kino can manage; it doesn't seem to produce audio output on playback, and has no usable audio configuration settings dialogs, and it freezes for long periods when doing edits. So that's not really usable.

PiTiVi is supposed to be simpler, but that wouldn't start at all, due to audio problems. I'm now installing cinelerra, which Greg reckons is nightmarish, but I think we have to try it because it's the most serious package available. It says it uses Pulse Audio, and should have more config options from the audio point of view.

Cinelerra starts up OK, and can load and play the DV capture from Kino (it crashes when I try to load/play MP4 directly). At first, I couldn't get audio to work over the USB headphones, but eventually I discovered that setting the audio driver to OSS, and the device path to /dev/audio2, I got audio -- presumably, to the system, the usb headset is /dev/audio2, which will be handy to know in other apps too. So far this looks quite promising. I've been able to drag two copies of the video clip (from the Media area) onto the timeline, and apply various transitions between them.

Much stress and excitement this morning trying to get my new monitor to work properly alongside an existing monitor, when they're at different resolutions (the new is 1920 x 1200, and the old is 1600 x 1200). The way to get it working with Ubuntu 64-bit (Intrepid) seems to be this:

• Disconnect the smaller monitor leaving only the bigger one plugged in, and reboot.
• Ubuntu correctly detects the new monitor, and configures its resolution correctly. Set the refresh rate if necessary in the Screen Resolution applet.
• Hot-plug the old monitor, then do Detect Displays in the Screen Res applet. It will detect the smaller monitor correctly, but shows it as "Off"; Select "On".
• The applet will ask for permission to change some settings (presumably writing to xorg.conf). Agree and authenticate.
• Reboot, or restart X, and the two monitors will now work happily together.

There were some wrinkles:

• Doing this disabled the fglrx properietary AMD driver, which turns off desktop effects (Compiz). I may try turning the driver back on, and the effects back on, later today, and I'll report on whether that works or not, but if it doesn't I can live without wobbly windows.
• The larger monitor is the main monitor, and so I had to move it to the left position to get the desktop to work right. There's no easy way to swap them around in software without the ATI Catalyst Control Center applet, and that won't work without the proprietary driver (see above). So I've moved the monitors physically rather than trying to do this with software.

Dismantled and removed my old Windows PC. Now that the 64-bit Intrepid box is stable and the VM seems to be working fine, I can reclaim some desk space. Cleaned the desk -- horrible but necessary, takes longer than you think...