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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

What happened to VirtualBox on Trisquel?

2019-04-18

Categories: unix  
Tags: unix  

Trisquel 10.04 LTS included VirtualBox, I could install and use it easily, and all was well, except that maybe it was a bit more buggy in the emulation than QEMU, or maybe that was just due to my old laptop having buggy VT-x. But in the newer versions, it is not to be found in the package repositories. Why is this? Purportedly, it was removed because its BIOS implementation requires OpenWatcom to compile, which is not Free Software due to its license. Therefore, they cut VirtualBox out completely. Debian also cut VirtualBox from the Main repo. But no worries, QEMU is still available, purportedly because it is more politically correct.

Earlier versions of VirtualBox could use bcc. But in later versions, they switched to OpenWatcom because they touted that bcc didn’t have all the features they needed.

Though because of this overall, time and time again, people are asking for VirtualBox on the Trisquel forums, and it keeps needing to get re-explained. Old habits die hard.

20190903/https://trisquel.info/en/forum/virtualbox-eclipse-java
20190903/https://trisquel.info/en/forum/cant-seem-install-virtualbox
20190903/https://trisquel.info/en/forum/there-something-we-can-do-about-virtualbox
20190903/https://trisquel.info/en/forum/looking-virtualbox-alternative
20190903/https://trisquel.info/en/forum/why-has-no-one-made-fork-virtualbox-any-form-linux
20190903/https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12011
20190903/https://trisquel.info/en/forum/virtualbox-being-removed-trisquel — codename: broken-cmdinst-trisquel layout: post title: Broken command line installer in Trisquel date: 2019-04-17 22:16 -0500 author: quorten categories: [unix] tags: [unix] —

In a hurry, I was hoping I could do a minimal command line install of Trisquel for some software development work with Golang and Docker in a virtual machine. Unfortunately, I ran into a serious roadblock. debian-installer was failing to load the libc6 udeb. After searching around, this was caused due to some mal-planned updates, and although there was a fix out in Debian upstream, unfortunately it didn’t quite make it to Ubunntu, and ultimately the version of Trisquel I was using. Very annoying, all these politics that must happen, but that was the way it was.

20190417/DuckDuckGo trisquel failed to load libc6 udeb
20190417/https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833706
20190417/https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=3417
20190417/https://askubuntu.com/questions/1131988/shouldnt-critical-netboot-fixes-propagate-back-to-the-base-image

So, I was chatting with a friend, and the topic came up that I was working on getting Windows 98 running in a virtual machine, with full features. But, the key question was this. “Why are you working with Windows 98 rather than something more moderm?”

So, I came about and drafted up a lot of text responses, and ultimately my final response was much shorter. But, for my own sake, here are the full details.

Ah, good question, but my answer must be even more tactful.

First of all, there are some things that really haven’t changed about computing from a user’s standpoint since the 1990s: general operating system architecture, C/C++ compilers, scripting languages, general GUI operation, basic web architecture, and so on. BUT, all of these things were accomplished using a fraction of the system resources we use to accomplish the same tasks today. So, in that sense, some of the things from the 1990s ARE modern, but they somehow manage to do so using a lot less system resources.

Read on →

Tanks, armored combat. Reading this through and really thinking about it, somehow I just think of it as goofy. Interestingly, chariots were historically largely used as implements of war.

20190408/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot
20190408/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks
20190408/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured_warfare
20190408/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_%28World_War_I%29

Seriously, what is the point of warfare if you are just going to armor up tanks to protect the occupants, and then blast out more powerful ammunition to attack enemy tanks? The original idea with developing tanks was to end a stalemate during World War I on the Western Front. Originally, the idea was to launch a tank forward to plow through the obstructions set up by trench warfare, and then infantry would follow the cleared path and continue the attack in a more traditional manner. Except when two such tanks from opposite sides would meet. But, this is merely scratching the surface, as ships, airplanes, and helicopters are also used in modern warfare.

What is warfare as formally defined? Now, now, sure there are lots of formal definitions from pundits out there, but let me put for a more technology modality neutral definition, hinging primarily off of physics.

Read on →

So, you’ve scanned a bunch of documents and books via the DSLR camera photography method, developed the RAW, generated one JPEG image per page, and now you want to convert these to PDF files, one per logical book or document. Or, in other words, one PDF file per “print job.” Old fashioned conventional wisdom would state that you would use ImageMagick to convert from JPEG to PDF, but that introduces losses. Sure, the conversion process is simple enough for me to write my own tool, but surely someone else must have already written a tool, haven’t they?

First things first, for extracting images from PDF files. There is a tool named pdfimages that is part of poppler, i.e. the Ghostscript library. So, no need to keep using my hand-rolled tool.

20190407/DuckDuckGo linux embed literal jpeg inside pdf no lossy conversion
20190407/https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/11835/pdf-to-jpg-without-quality-loss-gscan2pdf

Second, that important information and distraction aside, we want to do the reverse. So, keep searching.

20190407/DuckDuckGo linux embed unmodified lossless jpeg into pdf
20190407/https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/42856/how-can-i-convert-a-png-to-a-pdf-in-high-quality-so-its-not-blurry-or-fuzzy

Read on →

Now, here’s a challenge. Say you’ve got an old 1990s PC running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, or so on. How do you copy a hard disk image from that computer over the network? The previous methods that I have given assumed the ability to run GNU/Linux, which is undisputed in the modern computing world. But, the 1990s GNU/Linux world was a world far away from the world of GNU/Linux that we know of it today. By far and by large, most people got started by installing GNU tools on their existing operating system, but before they could get any further to trying out a full GNU/Linux, their PC was already obsolete and they were upgrading to a newer one that would have come pre-installed with Windows XP. Here, they would have had no fear doing the risky steps of repartitioning the hard drive on the fresh install of the new computer, not to mention the later genre of computers had much more homogeneous hardware and therefore better driver support by Linux. But, most importantly, the newer hardware was much more powerful, so running even modern GNU/Linux distributions on 2000s era hardware is a breeze.

But, nevertheless, there were still a significant number of people willing to take the challenge to get Linux installed and working on 1990s era PCs, and when they did get it working, they got it working quite well and it was useful for a large number of tasks. So, challenge ahead of us, how do you get started?

Read on →

DuckDuckGo and content farms

2019-04-05

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

DuckDuckGo, yes that is an interesting subject. Namely, it is the primary search engine I use for gathering information for this blog. So, what does Wikipedia have to say about it? For the most part, what it says today is what it said a few years ago. But, the popularity and traffic numbers is the new thing. In this year of 2019, DuckDuckGo has reached 1 billion searches per month. And quite a while ago, it previously took a full year to get to 1 billion searches!

So, what was the secret of DuckDuckGo’s growth success? By all means, it appears that some of the early traditional billboard advertising helped it inch up a little bit. But, what really helped it grow by leaps and bounds was its coverage in mass surveillance scandal news as an alternative to the evils promulgated by companies like Google. That is what really made DuckDuckGo take off. The second thing that really made DuckDuckGo take off was its full web privacy toolkit. Again, this is best understood in context of the mass media mass surveillance scandal news.

Interestingly enough, the inclusion of DuckDuckGo as an option in Safari and Firefox browsers didn’t appear to have as significant of an uptick as the uptick that came in response to mainstream media news. So, the secret of DuckDuckGo’s success? Start out by planning for a known gap in the market. Get a small community around your product. Then, wait for a kicker subject to come into the purview of mainstream media. Then, jump with traditional advertising and marketing within the mainstream media advertising outlets. Then, cash in on the growth to come.

Read on →

This is an interesting viewpoint on not being able to abstract privacy. What does that mean? The author starts with some background on a very old technique practiced by a Detroit police force before the advent of modern computing: STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Strees). The idea was to embed disguised police officers as ordinary laypeople throughout the area, so that potential criminals would always be on the lookout and self-police. However, as the author points out, living through such a regime, the effect of this was far from this ideal. Rather, it caused criminals to be more evasive and look further into more private life, and for those who were not criminal, but could be suspected as such due to demographics, they felt they were always being watched and treated as suspects. Zero privacy in the world for them, unlike their counterparts of different demographics.

Now, enter the modern era. We live in a world where the idea of surveiling someone in the public does not require asking for their permission. We have slumped this far down in privacy over the decades, irrespective of the technological means to the end. And in today’s world, we have an even more curious construct. There are those who are paying to be surveiled by their “Apple Watches, IoT toilets, quantified baby products, [Smart] Ring Doorbells, [and] Teslas,” whereas others are “paying the price for being watched,” “in the form of ankle bracelets, license plate readers, drones, facial recognition, and cell-site simulators.”

20190404/https://www.fastcompany.com/90323529/privacy-is-not-an-abstraction

Effects of exercise on your brain

2019-04-05

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Interesting article about the effects of exercise on your brain. Sure, we know brain performance is generally improved after exercise, but why? A few reasons covered by the article in a nutshell.

  • Brain waves increase in frequency, memory, attention, and information processing is stimulated.

  • The visual cortex is more attentive to the world around you, and it can identify flickering lights at higher frequencies before the light appears to be steady.

  • The brain increases its production of neurotransmitters during exercise, and shores them up for later use.

  • Exercise stimulates growth in the brain that effectively makes it appear younger: more blood vessels, more pathways, etc.

20190404/https://www.outsideonline.com/2186146/your-brain-exercise

Sure, if you’re in my boat, you know the only one, true, authentic, and de jure way to obtain Windows 98 is on a physical CD, either as unsold stock or on the used goods market. But, if your target is virtualization, what if you want to eschew with the redundant physical round-tripping? Well, then suffice it to say, you can go searching around on the Internet, and what you will find for sourcing will keep changing from one year to the next. This is what I found from a search this year.

Noteworthy is that only the OEM Windows 98 discs will boot, according to this site.

20190404/DuckDuckGo windows 98 se
20190404/https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-98/98-second-edition
20190404/https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/6677/redirect/p1
20190404/https://winworldpc.com/about

How do you copy a Macintosh Classic hard disk image over the network? Well, that’s a mighty question to be asking. How old of a Macintosh Classic are you talking about?

For the oldest of Macintosh Classic computers, “copying over the network” means copying over a serial connection. If you haven’t played around with the serial connection on your Macintosh yet, I’d recommend starting out with Macintosh Kermit. This will work on most older classic Macintoshes, except for the very oldest 128K Macintosh. However, let’s remember that very old Macintosh does not have internal hard disk drives! So, if you do happen to be the odd-ball that has an external hard disk drive connected to that very old Macintosh, consider yourself very lucky.

20190404/DuckDuckGo kermit macintosh serial
20190404/http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/mac.html
20190404/http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/usingmackermit.pdf
20190404/http://www.kermitproject.org/mac.html

Unfortunately, this far, Mac Kermit will only allow you to copy files across the serial connection. I have to keep looking for methods for copying a hard disk drive image over a serial connection. Of course you can’t store hard disk drive image of itself locally in a file or on an external floppy disk. Or, maybe I should simply roll up my sleeves and prepare to develop my own Macintosh Classic software to go do this.

Read on →