Maintenance

AT is presenting in B150 in the Wright building, and wanted to set up two laptops to project on the central and peripheral screens simultaneously. We've confirmed by testing that you can do this by using the Document Camera input for the second laptop. In the process, we discovered that our little PowerBook is dead. RIP PowerBook.

Note to self: whenever updating oXygen on Linux, after installing the new version, remember to update the oxygen.vmoptions file in the program directory to this:

-Xss64m
-Xmx700m
-Dcom.oxygenxml.language=English

otherwise you get stack overflows on documents of any size. Just updated to 10.1, and luckily remembered doing this recently.

<key>VMOptions</key>
<string>-Xss64m -Xms128M -Xmx768M -XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=10 -XX:+UseParallelGC</string>

On restarting the Windows VirtualBox VM this morning, I initially got warnings that previously-mounted drives were not connected; this was true (Drive2, where the VDI hard drive file is located, wasn't yet mounted, and there was no CD in the CD drive). I mounted Drive2 and tried to start the VM again, but it crashed and restarted Linux; then it told me the VM was unusable, and I would have to revert to an earlier snapshot. This I did, only to discover it had rolled right back to before the Delphi 2009 install. I had to start again with Delphi 2009, further impeded by the fact that my CD drive seemed unable to read the Delphi CD (Greg made me an ISO, which worked fine).

Digging into the Help file, I found this:

When, on VM startup, a CD, DVD or floppy device is unavailable, VirtualBox by default prints an error message and refuses to start the virtual machine. In some situations this behavior is not desirable.
The behavior can be changed for the CD/DVD drive with the following configuration change command:
VBoxManage setextradata "YourVM"
   "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#2/Config/AttachFailError" 0
The equivalent command for the floppy drive is:
VBoxManage setextradata "YourVM"
   "VBoxInternal/Devices/i82078/0/LUN#0/Config/AttachFailError" 0
You will still get a warning message that a device is not available. Some guest operating systems may show strange behavior when using saved state or snapshots, especially if a previously mounted medium is no longer available when the virtual machine is resumed. 

This would seem to be at the heart of it. I had previously suspended the VM rather than closing it down; I'll avoid that in future. I've also run the two commands above to make sure a missing drive is not an issue, and I'm going to take several snapshots in quick succession to make sure if I have to roll back, I don't end up rolling back too far (although it was VBox that rolled me back too far; I only requested to go back one snapshot). I've also backed up the whole VM after the Delphi 2009 install.

This has cost me a day, and it's a bit worrying. If it happens again, we may have to conclude the VBox isn't ready for prime-time, and look at other options.

Ported the Nuvola-based image DLL project, and its GUI browsing tool, over to Delphi 2009, and compiled successfully. Both the DLL and the executable end up being slightly bigger in D2009 than D2005, but that's probably to be expected.

So far, I've managed to get the following third-party packages installed:

• JEDI (JCL and JVCL), using their installer, which works great.
• Virtual Treeview (again, using the installer).
• ADOM (problematic; following the instructions didn't work, and I had to remove the Utilities package and let the main ADOM package build it during its own build).
• Graphics32 (very problematic; eventually had to comment out a reference to GR32_BDS2006 package before I could get it to compile).
• UniSynEdit (worked fine).

I've been cautiously testing Delphi 2005 to make sure it hasn't been damaged by any of these changes, and so far it's building IMT just fine. I've also been able to create and compile an application which tests Graphics32 and UniSynEdit successfully, so it looks like we're on track for an IMT port.

No time to document -- that'll come tomorrow -- but I have it working, and have been able to compile projects (Transformer and IMT).

I've partially succeeded in getting a working VM, by doing this:

• A fresh install of Windows in an empty VM, using Greg's proven disk.
• Logging in as administrator, and creating my regular user account (with the same name and pw as on the original machine).
• Installing the VirtualBox add-ins (this failed once, and I had to reboot the VM and run the installer manually; it shows up on a VBox mapped virtual drive).
• Mounting the folder containing the backup file (have to share it first in Ubuntu, then mount it under VBox).
• Using Windows Backup to restore from the backup file. This went smoothly, except that it complained that a couple of system files had been replaced, and would have to be restored from the disk. I re-mounted the installer CD to allow this.

This basically worked, but broke a few things. IE would not run, so neither would Windows Update; I had to manually download the IE7 installer and re-install it (this took ages). Then I was able to run Windows Update, and I'm currently installing SP3.

Delphi runs, but can't open any projects, complaining of an "Invalid install", and saying that Delphi.Personality is not configured. This might be a showstopper, but before I take it on, I'm going to do all the relevant Windows updates and also install .NET, which Delphi needs. If that doesn't work, I may have to do some kind of rescue-install from the original disks.

Built a VM from the SP3 slipstream disk, but it failed twice; tried another from an OEM disk, but this could not be activated. I think the slipstream disk is broken, but Greg is going to build me a VMWare image from another one, and then I'll unroll the backup of my old machine into it. That's pretty much my last hope; failing that, I think I'll have to keep the old machine around to do Windows programming, or try VMWare (which I don't like, and which costs money).