(Batching up some entries...)
Didn't think I was that stressed about starting the new job, but either that, or just the unexpected heat and the bloody mosquito buzzing in my ear meant that I ended up waking up every hour or so, woke up so exhausted that I fell back to sleep and missed the Questura to get registered for the foreigner's permesso di soggiorno.
Then got in, found my PC which I'd confidently said I'd install Linux on myself (rather than taking it with XP working by default), then spent most of the rest of the day trying to get it to work. To be fair, the PC seemed to have a problem with the fan, when the hard disk or CD whirred around too much it overheated and rebooted.
Funnily enough, intense activity on HD and CD are a characteristic of installation processes. Annoyingly, neither Ubuntu nor Debian (passed me by one of the 2 friendly neighbourhood linux boffins Alessandro and Riccardo who helped me) are happy about resuming installation after crashing, so we tried various apt-getty things to get X and so on working. Debian eventually installed, but would only give me an unusable 800x640 resolution. Hoary had a fun bug whereby if the root password and the confirmation password don't match, it will continue to ask you for the confirmation password, never letting you say, "shucks, I must have fucked up completely, I know, I'll type the original password again too".
After setting the fan speed to full and letting the CPU cool down again, I eventually got a functional Ubuntu and was able to start work. The build system and procedures are very different from those at $jobs->prev, and there's a lot of code to get my head around. The fun starts in earnest tomorrow!
