My attempts yesterday with Linux were thwarted by an incredibly late notice of upgrading from Exchange 2003 to 2007. The email was sent at 4:13pm, I conservatively estimate that about 6pm the same day things were shifted about – there was an apology for the “short notice” in the notification email. About two hours, short notice indeed.

I also spent the day trying to get my computer to play nicely with the XP partition and try to get it virtualised. I tried to start with VirtualBox but that didn’t turn out well as I ended up having an issue with the agp440.sys driver whilst booting. I found an issue on the VirtualBox tracker (http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/995) and worked through it but nothing seemed to work properly. I also tried some tips from another site but that didn’t do anything either and I had no real progress.

I gave up and went to vmWare and the latest version of its “Server” product (formerly GSX or the cut down version of their ESX system) and its full web interface is just plain painful and I could get anything to think of working. I found an older copy of their tools that includes the fat client vmWare client tool and used it which was much better and actually let me do what I want to. I guess they’re trying to push people into the ESX environment by making the server as unfriendly as possible. I’m sure the web interface works nicely on Windows but not on anything else. A shame really. The older version didn’t seem to let me get far either so I ended up giving up trying to get Windows to play nicely and virtualise under Linux.

I also had some fun trying to get the Google Toolbar to install properly. Thankfully someone else has solved the problem and with a small tweak I managed to get it installed fine as well as Google Gears. Lots of fun!