Maintenance

Spent a little while building a Feisty VM in VMWare to test our Windows apps under WINE, our Websites under Konqueror, and various other stuff that has to be done on Linux these days. My old Dapper VM was obsolete.

I'm guessing that some of us are missing some very useful fonts. As a multi-lingual kind of place, we all need to have a selection of fonts that allow us to see all the unicode goodness that documents might offer. Here's my list of good-to-have fonts:

DejaVu: http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/
Gentium: http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/
Aboriginal Sans/Serif: http://www.languagegeek.com/font/fontdownload.html
Thryomanes v1.2: http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/

Yes, there are others, but these will cover basic requirements. To stay up-to-date, you should get them from the above sites but to be neighbourly I've uploaded a zip file containing these fonts. Get it here.

Greg and I spent most of the day doing a test install of VISTA on Cilantro. We now have a fully configured workstation. This is what we did and learned:

• Greg nuked the drive before installing the upgrade, so it complained that there was nothing to upgrade from. However, we continued without entering a product key, to arrive at the trial version, and then ran the installer again (from inside Vista) to "upgrade" with the key. It worked. Then we activated it online.
• The install process itself is tedious and involves multiple reboots. No change there.
• Running with an old graphics card, Aero was disabled, but we were still able to try out everything else.
• Installed all our major apps (IMT, Transformer, HotPot) and tested briefly. All seem to run just fine.
• Found an annoying bug with desktop icons: keep setting them to 24px in the display control panel, but they bounce back to 32 on every reboot.
• Downloaded a print driver and installed the Lexmark -- works OK.
• Downloaded the driver and toolbox for the CanoScan N670U scanner. Works OK.
• Installed OpenOffice -- seems to work fine.
• Installed Firefox. The only wrinkle was that we did this during the initial install, and when we tried to activate Windows, Firefox was launched, and then the MS site complained. Had to set IE to be default browser to get past that, but in the end we activated Windows from the Control Panel after the second install.
• Installed Java 1.6 -- no problem.
• Looked for TweakUI, but there's no version from MS for Vista. Instead, I found TweakVI, which is a freebie with lots of useful features. During its installation, it offered to turn off User Account Control (UAC), which was a great relief because it got rid of the annoying confirmation dialog boxes that popped up every time we did anything.
• The new Aero-ready graphics card arrived, so we installed that; it found the drivers automatically. Enabled the onboard sound in the bios (the Audigy sound card was not VISTA-compatible, so Greg had removed it), and then successfully played a DVD in Media Centre.
• Re-profiled the system, and we were then able to turn on all the Aero eye-candy -- which doesn't amount to much other than transparency on windows borders and a fancy task-switcher. Pah.
• Installed Oxygen to test the Java functionality. Seems to work fine.
• Tried file sharing. You can add a user from the domain as a sharer of the folder in three categories: Reader, Contributor and Co-Owner. I added Greg as a Contributor; this should allow read-write (like XP with everything checked except Full Control).

Spent some time with Greg trying to diagnose the problem we were having last week with France unable to see documents on Claire's machine. Endive, on boot, had several nondescript errors relating to svhost.exe, so we suspect a hardware problem that may have affected connectivity; nevertheless, when logged in as mholmes on France's machine (Chicory) I was able to access and use the mariage share. This suggests the problem might be temporary, but in any case, we need a better solution to this kind of working environment. Greg's now looking at the possibility of mounting a tapor directory (in this case, the "mariage" user's home directory) as a samba share on Windows boxes.

Martin and I got the old Sony turntable and a pre-amp from the CALL installed in the existing audio system.

We need to purchase at least two cartridges for the turntable. The existing one looks like it may be a bit worn, and we'll want a spare. The current cartridge is an Ortofon FF 15E (Sound Hounds carries Ortofon), but we can use pretty much anything.