Today I went about installing it using the Debian packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-source and installing Windows XP home in a disk image which I’m probably going to use regularly for checking sites in Internet Explorer. To me this looks like a much easier solution than trying to force a program to work in Wine although the downside is that you need a copy of windows.

The guest operating system runs smoothly at a resolution of 800×600 but it feels bizarre to be using Windows in a window. I’m also considering installing some other things like maybe Solaris or BSD in other images just to have a play with them.

Since I thought I might want a bit more memory in the host OS before letting multiple other OSes have a chunk of it I decided to upgrade my PC (first major upgrade since 2004) this will probably be the last major upgrade it will ever get. It now has triple the RAM (now 1.5GB) and a slightly quieter CPU fan (or at least one that doesn’t make the case resonate).

Update: 2007/11/16 I’ve also replaced my NVidia GeForce 4 with a NVidia 7600GT unfortuantely due to my widescreen TFT and somewhat small desk I am unlikely to use the dual headedness feature of it (though if i did get another similar monitor I’d have a whole metre of horizontal screen space)

So now I am back it is time to take a look at fixing it. I remember my motherboard manual saying it supported SATA and I remember the motherboard coming with official MSI SATA cables (because they were a bright shade of orange). So I go out and get myself a SATA drive and then I try to install my new drive. There’s one big problem however, despite the manual saying it has SATA and despite the included SATA cables there is no actual SATA connector on the motherboard. Why include SATA cables with a mobo without SATA connectors? WTF?

Installing things would be a lot easier if the hardware vendors always had ways of uniquely identifying what they were selling. Hauppauge Nova-T PCI can refer to cards containing any of 3 different chipsets (mine was a Conexant), that get sold with the same name.

Here’s a HOWTO explaining the installation process.

For anyone else that is trying to tune in digital channels around the Plymouth area, the Caradon Hill transmitter was picked up when I used the linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.0 scan tool (util/scan/scan) with the Oxford (util/scan/dvb-t/uk-Oxford) settings.

# T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy
T 578000000 8MHz 2/3 NONE QAM64 2k 1/32 NONE

…until a few hours later when I found that the replacement power supply had also broken. There may be a short in the router somewhere. I had been meaning to get a new one anyway because that one had one of the ethernet ports broken.

I went out to PC World to get a new router. Strangely though the one which included a USB Wireless dongle cost £5 less than the one which didn’t by this I can only guess that the USB Wireless dongle has negative worth, I asked the guy at PC World if he’d pay me to take some home with me but he said the USB dongles on their own were £30.

UPDATE: The USB dongle that I acquired seems to be working on my laptop

UPDATE 2: It’s working with encryption, even after a reboot!

I also persuaded my Mum to get me a Digital Terrestrial TV Tuner card as a Christmas present because I’m the only one in the house not to have a digibox.