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The Virtual Bean Counter

Prior to the trip to buy groceries each week, the tedious chore of wandering round the house checking how much of all the consumables that a household requires is actually present must be completed. Everywhere there is a stash; upstairs, downstairs, all the cupboards, the fridge, the freezer, etc., etc. I could try to do it from memory, but who has the available headspace to remember how many tins of beans you have at any particular moment and, even if you do try to use this method, how many extra tins of corned beef or jars of mustard is it reasonable to have to buy just to save yourself from the weekly traipse around the house doing a stock-check?

What I need is a Bean Counter.

I want to be able to scan in the barcode on a tin of beans when I buy it and when I use it scan it out again and have the stock level reflect that fact. Then, on shopping day, I can just look at the stock levels from my desk. Or even better it could just tell me when I need to buy more beans again.

Of course this is a really basic function for most businesses and there are whole suites of software for stock management, but this is a household not Amazon. Fortunately a nice person called Bernd Bestel has already solved this problem and the solutions' name is Grocy.

It is supposedly a whole ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system designed for the household. It sits on a central server (ie computer) and you or your SO can use a phone as a barcode scanner to interface with that server. Perfect. I don't need the whole ERP shebang, but if it can solve the bean problem then I am willing to give it a try.

Let's set it up.

The first task is to set up the main software on a server that, ideally, should be on all the time, or at least all the times that you want to be using or buying things. I could do this on my main PC but I don't necessarily trust Windows to be able to properly uninstall the package if I decide it isn't going to do what I want. However, if I do decide that it is the right solution, I would prefer to run it on a lower power consumption device as it is going to be on all the time, for example a Small Form Factor device like a Raspberry Pi. In addition, I have also been looking at home automation and wondering whether it is worth getting involved and this too would require an always-on device.

Happily, Grocy has already been integrated into Home Assistant (the leading open source platform for home automation). So I could kill two birds with one stone (a horrible metaphor, btw) and I do have a Raspberry Pi somewhere. But as to where exactly I don't know and really can't be bothered to go a-hunting for it. The answer, then, is to virtualise a Raspberry Pi and install the system on that while I determine whether it is a keeper or not.

Virtualise? I'll leave Copilot to explain that;

Virtualization in computing refers to the process of creating a simulated, or virtual, computing environment rather than a physical one. Virtualization uses software to create an abstraction layer over physical computer hardware. This layer allows for the division of a single computer’s components (such as processors, memory, and storage) into multiple virtual machines. Each virtual machine runs its own operating system and behaves like an independent computer, even though it shares the underlying hardware.

In short I can create one computer inside my desktop PC - like blowing a bubble inside a bigger bubble - then set up Home Assistant and Grocy and if I don't like it I can just trash the whole system rather than trying to uninstall a chunk of programs and any alterations they have made to my PC. Simples!

OK, but how? VirtualBox (VB) from Oracle is my preferred software - other virtualisation software or hypervisors are available, but A) I haven't used them before and B) they are normally more complex than VB, not that VB is exactly user friendly.

Setting up VB is not too taxing though, just download the right one for Windows 11, currently v7.1.4, and install it. To test it out I decided to set up a Linux system, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, obtained from here. As why not have access to Linux on my desktop?

Unfortunately it was not to be that simple as VirtualBox started with error messages as soon as I tried to get Ubuntu running.

VERR_SVM_DISABLED error message from VirtualBox

Let's debug.

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