VMs take three, everything has problems

My Arch VMware still doesn't do touchpad scroll, not that I've tried.

I cloned it for my co-worker, edited the accounts, tested the system, it worked fine. Copied it to the shared hard drive, then to her laptop. And now it has quirky IP address or hostname lookup issues that we can't figure out, such that the boss decided to start over.

With OpenSUSE! He trusted the official VM tools, it didn't work. May have tried Open VM Tools, I stopped paying attention.

Co-worker moved onto Ubuntu, using an image from OS Boxes, which I view as potentially NSA/mafic front, but hey, it's not my IP. That seems to be working, possibly in all ways.

I was inspired to go back to VirtualBox, and started over from scratch. After 40-50 minutes, mostly waiting for packages to download and install, it was ready, with X and XFCE and Firefox. Display resizes, cut and paste works, even scrolling works! Everything... except shared folders; I thought I followed the Arch instructions, but I get a "Protocol Error".

Sigh.

I have continued to realize VMs are cool. I could have a second Arch VM and play with desktop environments without messing up my working one. Or play with Ubuntu and Red Hat without rebooting. Or you could skip "will Linux work on this laptop?", install VBox or QEMU on Windows, then go full screen and ignore Windows almost entirely.

Sometimes doing things right does help

The work system has two kinds of debug/logging statements.

One is a class with the standard methods (trace through critical) which are just print statements that add "DEBUG" or "INFO" as appropriate. There's not even a hint of output throttling. But it is a class, and so I can rip its guts out and replace them with calls to Python's logging module, and it works.

Then there's the 500+ naked print statements, with "ERROR" or such in their constructed output strings. I can search for them easily -- though I can just search for 'print', I think these are the only uses -- but I don't see any programmatic way of converting them, especially as the logging output formatting needs types (%s, %d) which are totally absent from the existing statements. (And it's python 2, so they are statements.)

I see a day of boring editing in my future.