Recovering from Bicon with a lot of sleep in horrid weather I decided to do some techie tinkering.

This can be summarised as : VMWare server rules, 3D glasses are a bit sub par.

I grabbed a cheap pair of shutter glasses from ebay to see what they're like. This particular pair are an old set of Elsa Revelators - a DDC activated set of LCD polarised shutter glasses.

( issues with 3D glasses )
I eventually got it basically working, but to my mind the effect isn't exciting enough to pursue it (although watching trees waving in the distance in Oblivion is reasonably fun).

After that I continued the quest to get OpenBSD on one of the Neostation 3000s I got a while back. This had mixed results :

1) one new SATA hard drive from Scan returned the following day as it refused to consistently work
2) A BIOS upset about booting from a hard drive when it already had a USB stick installed
3) OpenBSD install on the USB stick used for Vista Readyboost only to find that
i) The write speed across the stick is not uniform and thus it should definitely not be used in Vista..
ii) After successfully installing OpenBSD on the stick it crashed.. Probably upset by the graphics card.

So, I resorted to virtualisation, which worked first time. VirtualPC and Qemu can't be used as there is no USB support (can't connect CF card reader to virtual machine), and VMWare Player doesn't allow the creation of images. However, VMWare Server 2.0 beta does allow the creation of images, and other than having to edit the hosts file to resolve the local machine, worked first time.

I installed OpenBSD, plugged the USB card reader into the Virtual Machine, activated Flashdist and it all just worked. The neostation instantly booted up onto the CF card outputing on serial console. yay!

I can therefore soon switch off the noisy sparcstation in my study, move the firewall downstairs, and have an '100Mb' link via the Homeplug devices between upstairs and downstairs.