#VMnesting musings:
Needed specifically #Android on PC. Sadly BlissOS is MIA, & the only x86 alternative I found concerns me for privacy.
Also saw about #Waydroid, & having used it a while back, wasn't amused by the idea of using it again. But after some thought and some hours of struggle, cooked something:
Installed the apps I needed on Waydroid on Fedora on #Virtualbox on Linux Mint.
A bit laggy and a gradually increasing heat source? Yes and yes. But for what I need, still it worked great!
Basically in a course I am taking, I have to find global challenges and implications of a digital topic. So we turned to piracy in the end because it has been here for a while (and lets face it, I was biased and its my favorite topic.) and has its qualities and some drawbacks which need to be discussed in a topic like that. With ...
You may just be right about that. I swore by PKZ204G.EXE for years until someone mentioned WinZip to me. I thought, "What is this trash?" and never gave it a second thought until I stumbled across WinRar - "Oh this might make rar'ing stuffs up to send to the priv tracker really easy!" It did! but.... It also handled unzipping gzipped tarballs too which was nice when I wanted to checkout stuffs on a Windows box. I think I started running WinRar back with wYnd0z3 XP, or maybe NT 4. I honestly can't remember, but I quickly learned that by simply right clicking on archives and using the context menu that you don't get the nag, so that's typically how I used it.
I don't use wYnd0z3 anymore, or at least I should say, that professionally, I keep abreast, but here's a horror story I should probably share here; it's privacy related, not so much having to do with copyright and licensing issues, but rather.... Well, more than just the ownership of your data. You, are the product, and your very identities are I believe, at risk, more and more each day. Here goes:
So I wanted to replace my old lappy, the WiFi radio was quite obsolete, couldn't connect to many new WiFi networks - especially many new or newly remodelled Starbucks and it's easy to move Slackware to a new box, but I insisted on having a 17" monitor - I just like the real estate; and I could get a good refurbed Xeon powered Dell with a boatload of memory for a reasonable price.
I didn't mind that my new lappy arrived with Win 11 pro pre-installed, I needed to beat on that OS a little bit, not too much though, since it wasn't too dissimilar to Win 10 and I soon kinda shelved it, taking time to decide upon whether to install Proxmox VE on it, move my still quite snappy, warm and fuzzy Slackware -current install over to it, or re-purpose it as a Debian Forkey platform. I had spent only a few weeks with it here and there, and aside from seriously intrusionary particulars that I really detested, like being even worse than that of Win 10 was at resetting defaults that really pissed me off, there's nothing new that it offered me to learn that I couldn't get from launching a VM of it anyway.
So it sat... and sat... maybe three months or so? I was busy and in no hurry to retire a laptop running Slackware that still screamed after being moved from three previous machines in the past decade. One day I decided to go to a Starbucks where I knew my laptop couldn't negotiate the WiFi encryption and didn't want to bring my portable WiFi Puck with me so I grabbed the Xeon. It was truly a dream after all.
I had some simple stuff to do, mostly reading and writing up some reports and the last couple of times I fired it up I had been asked to install updates, but I, like so many others when there's no critical reason apparent, procrastinated.
So I ordered my coffee, took a sip, sat down, and fired up the Xeon beast. WTF? Bitlocker lolwut? No! No bitlocker! I don't use that crap. I do my own encryption. Wait! WTF? Key? There's no key God Dammit, I've never activated Bitlocker! Oh, I can sign in to my mAcR0sFot account and recover.... Well, that's just fricken' great to know but I've always known better than to do anything but a local or domain account - NEVER a mAcR0sFot account!!!
Okay, I guess that's kinda like the bad ending of an old film noir flick from the 40's that you wished had spent just three minutes of treatment developing the tragedy or happily ever after, instead of just abruptly saying, "The End" right before the lights in the theater come on. But not in my story.
Homey don't play dat! There wasn't anything that wasn't already on my NextCloud server that was even remotely important to me, except perhaps having to reinstall Thunderbird and waiting for my IMAP server to sync to my new MUA.
Debian it is. I still love my #Slackware lappy the way it is and I don't need a mobile #Proxmox box when I can just use stuff already built in or install #VirtualBox. So I whacked the mirrored SSDs and wiped the smaller one, switched from RAID to AHCI and other adjustments in the BIOS, installed #Debian Testing from a netinst.iso on USB with #KDE#Plasma and #Xfce, and Boom Shakalaka BOOM! 💥 Mic Drop! 🎤
I am truly going to miss WinRar, but I'm not going to miss #Windows at all. I'll still have to see it and fix it several times a week and continue to convince people to ditch it, but yeah, I've been really perturbed with Microsoft ever since they had the audacity to release Win 95a on my birthday, with yet more trash to come for the next 30 years, and if there's anyone out there who is even slightly entertaining the thought of suggesting, "Well, it was something you did - you know it. Windows wouldn't just do that".... It's actually well documented that it really will do that to you, and what's coming down the line is even worse, but I think they're saving the truly abominable stuff for after their campaign to recycle (destroy) 100 million perfectly good PCs and laptops.
I do believe it's time to ditch Microsoft Windows, truly, and I made half a career on it teaching the MCSE program for them and building large scale enterprises in Fortune 500's with Microsoft products. The #Linux and #BSD desktop is mature enough and straight-forward enough to install that it's actually much easier than installing Windows nowadays, and #FOSS applications abound that are bundled in with distributions that are are intuitive and familiar enough for anyone to use out of the box. But I'm just talking here, right?
Watch This Video that actually references #Bitlocker actually activating itself (Going back to 24h2 and June 2024, especially on 'pro', but also affected 'home' variants too).
Oh, yeah, #WinRar - handles .zip, tar.gz, .rar, arj, etc., etc., yeah it probably is the most pirated product ever, lolz. And the main point is that the publisher (devs) don't really make much of a fuss over it because it drives corporate sales of licenses, lolz - Thanks for bringing that up!
Thumbnail for my video, showing me on my desk holding up the TL866 EPROM programmer box with an old Lenovo laptop running Linux Mint in the background. The overlayed text reads: "Using the TL866 EPROM Programmer in Linux?!"
CachyOS is a pain in the ass to install through #VirtualBox. I've had nothing but problems with #Arch derivatives when testing through a VM. Once installed, it's a snappy little Desktop Environment. XFCE is my environment of choice.
Bazzite, a flavor of #Fedora, is strange. The default installation size is 22.1GB. 4 CPU cores & 4GB Ram if not enough hardware. Seems kind of bloated to me.
Installiere gerade #Windows11 in #VirtualBox unter #Linux. Nicht ganz so trivial wie gedacht. Aber es läuft. Hätte nicht gedacht, dass es virtuell fast genau so lange dauert wie "real".
Mit Linux Mint ging das vom Life-USB-Stick deutlich schneller.
Tja.
#Linux Weekly Roundup for August 17th, 2025: #NVIDIA 580 improves #Wayland support, #KDE Gear 25.08 adds new features and improvements to your favorite KDE apps, #VirtualBox 7.2 adds initial support for Linux kernel 6.17, #GNOME 48.4 improves GNOME Software update notifications, SparkyLinux 8.0 rebased on #Debian 13, Grml 2025.08 enhances #SysAdmin tools, GNOME 49 desktop enters public beta testing, Debian's 32nd birthday, GNOME's 28th birthday, and mroe https://9to5linux.com/9to5linux-weekly-roundup-august-17th-2025
heise+ | Wie man Kali Linux unter Apple Silicon virtualisiert
Das Hacker-Linux Kali kann man auf Macs mit M-CPUs komfortabel in einer virtuellen Maschine installieren. Wir zeigen, wie es mit UTM und VirtualBox geht.
Project on implications of Piracy (need opinions articles and ideas)
Basically in a course I am taking, I have to find global challenges and implications of a digital topic. So we turned to piracy in the end because it has been here for a while (and lets face it, I was biased and its my favorite topic.) and has its qualities and some drawbacks which need to be discussed in a topic like that. With ...