Microsoft – Paolo Redaelli

Quickemu

Paolo Redaelli — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 23:43:49 +0000

This quickemu could easily dislodge VirtualBox as my favorite desktop virtualization solution:

Quickly create and run highly optimized desktop virtual machines for Linux, macOS and Windows; …

Quickemu now also includes comprehensive support for macOS and Windows.

Features

macOS Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave & High Sierra

Windows 10 and 11 including TPM 2.0

Ubuntu and all the official Ubuntu flavours

Over 360 operating system editions are supported!

Full SPICE support including host/guest clipboard sharing

VirtIO-webdavd file sharing for Linux and Windows guests

VirtIO-9p file sharing for Linux and macOS guests

QEMU Guest Agent support; provides access to a system-level agent via standard QMP commands

Samba file sharing for Linux, macOS and Windows guests (if smbd is installed on the host)

VirGL acceleration

USB device pass-through

Smartcard pass-through

Automatic SSH port forwarding to guests

Network port forwarding

Full duplex audio

Braille support

EFI (with or without SecureBoot) and Legacy BIOS boot

Graphical user interfaces available

Perché non usare l’originale?

Paolo Redaelli — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 19:21:00 +0000

The best part of Windows 11 is a revamped Windows Subsystem for Linux

Io sarò paranoico, ma continuo a sentire puzza di Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (Abbraccia, estendi ed estingui) .

Se la parte migliore di Win11 è il sottosistema Linux perché non usare Linux direttamente?

Oltre al fatto che l’esperienza di software libero che ottieni è monca perché la maggior parte dei programmi lato server gira male.

Perché non usare Linux direttamente?

A new round

Paolo Redaelli — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 12:06:25 +0000

http://www.fastweb.it/web-e-digital/come-installare-facilmente-linux-su-windows-10/

A new round of the usual Microsoft tactic: embrace, extend, extinguish. Now at step one

They got an Elephant In the House

Paolo Redaelli — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 19:42:14 +0000

From: Microsoft Tries Hard To Play Nice With Open Source, But There’s an Elephant In the Room – Slashdot

Esther Schindler writes: They’re trying, honest they are. In 2016 alone, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Microsoft announced SQL Server on Linux; integrated Eclipse and Visual Studio, launched an open-source network stack on Debian Linux; and it’s adding Ubuntu Linux to its Azure Stack hybrid-cloud offering. That’s all well and good, he says, but it’s not enough. There’s one thing Microsoft could do to gain real open-source trust: Stop forcing companies to pay for its bogus Android patents. But, there’s too much money at stake, writes sjvn, for this to ever happen. For instance, in its last quarter, volume licensing and patents, accounted for approximately 9% of Microsoft’s total revenue.

Quite right. But I also acknowledge that also SirJorgelOfBorgel is quite reasonable:

At this point, a large part of IT simply will never appreciate Microsoft, no matter what they do.

“We’d trust them if they’d only do X!” No, you wouldn’t. You’d figure out some other reason to hate them.

News flash, it’s 2016, and Microsoft is no longer the most evil or dangerous bigcorp out there. Apple, Google, and Facebook, have all surpassed Microsoft. Can we get back to some actual issues?

I can’t forget we were called “a cancer” but I must earnestly acknowledge that they weren’t the most evil knight anymore. They turned into a “lawful newtral” entity, speaking

Growing your VirtualBox Virtual Disk

Paolo Redaelli — Sun, 28 Jun 2015 19:55:26 +0000

Most people simply had to deal with proprietary software that more or less runs exclusively on Microsoft OSes. For example when I bought my Dell laptop I used the Microsoft license that I grudgingly had to bought to create a fully legal installation into a virtual machine as the physical machine never ran it. I did even the first boot using GNU/Linux. I spent the serial of my fully legally owned license to install in into a VirtualBox instance.

I underestimated the never ending space hunger of those OSes so I found useful this “Growing your VirtualBox Virtual Disk (The Fat Bloke Sings)” copied here just in case it goes offline.

Don’t you just hate it when this happens:

Out of disk-space error.

Fortunately, if you’re running inside VirtualBox, you can resize your virtual disk and magically make your guest have a bigger disk very easily. There are 2 steps to doing this…

1. Resize the virtual disk

Use the VBoxManage command line tool to extend the size of the Virtual Disk, specifying the path to the disk and the size in MB:

VBoxManage modifyhd | [–resize |–resizebyte ]
 
If you booted up your guest at this point, the extra space is seen as an unformatted area on the disk, like this:

[picture missing]

So we now need to tell the guest about the extra space available.

2. Extend the guest’s partition to use the extra space

How you do this step depends on your guest OS type and the tools you have available.

Linux guests often include the excellent gparted partition editor, whereas Windows 7 and 8 provide the Computer Management tool which can resize partitions.

Unfortunately, with Windows XP the Computer Management tool couldn’t do this. But I do have a couple of other options:

Most Linux installable .isos include the aforementioned gparted tool, so I could simply attach, say, an Ubuntu install iso as a Virtual CD/DVD in my Windows XP vm and boot off that. (NB don’t install Ubuntu, just run it from the CD). Then use gparted to extend the Windows XP partition, before finally rebooting.

But I took another route and plugged my resized virtual disk to a Windows Server 2012 vm I had lying around. Then I used the Computer Management tool in Windows Server 2012 to extend the partition of the Windows XP disk, before shutting down, unplugging the disk and reattaching to my Windows XP vm. (Note that if your vm’s use different disk controllers, Windows will check the disks on booting, don’t worry).

When I finally boot up my Windows XP guest I see the available disk space and all is well.