As this blog doubles up for my memory pad, here’s the list of stuff that I’ve just installed:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• WinSCP
• PuTTY
• Spybot
• Avast
• OpenOffice
• Pidgin
• XChat (silverx’s)
• The MS PowerToys
• Flash Player
• AIR
• Acrobat Reader
• GVim
• GIMP
• iTunes
• VLC

SP3 (given that my Windows disk is Slipstreamed with SP2)

I guess there will be more stuff to install — the MS Viewers seem likely, as will another 400Megs of patches and things…

The exception to this is that I use VMWare for when I need to use Windows, e.g., to do stuff in Visio, or sort out something like Page Breaks & Tables for a Word Document: two features *really* lacking in OpenOffice…

But now, I want to watch a news report off ITN. I should have just found a Torrent. It would have been a lot quicker. And saved the web of *another* rant-blog posting…

You’d have thought it would be fairly easy. Oh no. 4oD don’t work on *nix:

Who can use 4oD?

4oD is available online on your PC and through our digital television partners, BT Vision, Tiscali TV or Virgin Media. You’ll need to be a resident in the UK or the Republic of Ireland to watch 4oD.

On your PC
To be able to get 4oD on your PC, you will need:

* A PC with Windows XP or Windows Vista
* Internet Explorer 5.5 or above
* A broadband internet connection

Read about our minimum system requirements to find out more

Please note that Mac, Linux and non-XP users will currently not be able to use this service.
http://www.channel4.com/4od/help.html

So, over to the VM…

‘cept that didn’t have: A recent enough Media Player, DotNet, a bazillion patches (post SP2) …

And installing all of those updates means that my 6GB partition weren’t big enough to actually carry on (bearing in mind this is just XP, Office 2003, a printer driver, Acrobat Reader…). Great. Should be easy enough to sort that out, he thinks.

Nope.

Step One: try to work outhow to delete the snapshot made accidentally…

Step Two: oh, that crashes VMWare. So let’s rebuild VMWare…

Step Three: oh, it seems as though that might’ve worked…

Step Four: let’s try and resize the partition: yum. And yay

Step Five: see if Windows wants to play ball.
Fuck. Nope, it now recognizes there’s two disks, not the one partition… so, erm, over to the live CD and thence GPartEd…

(at this point, I thought, “fuck it”, I’m gonna blog)

Step Six: ignore the gparted warnings, and see if that’s sorted it…

Step Seven: let’s reboot into Windows. Oh look, it wants another reboot. Fuckwittery.

Step Seven(b): well, guess what, it’s not worked. But I have had a brainfart. Despite saying “I don’t want a paging file, but you’re gonna give me one, anyhow”, let’s resize that to get some space on this VM Disk….

So, erm, yeah. Maybe I’ll fix this a bit proper, but right now, i’ve had enough… I though *nix was meant to be the more difficult to use OS…