Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2020 11:38:41 +0200 From: Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf@riseup.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: URGENT: Microsoft overwrites boot loader! Message-ID: <20200717113841.51884f2a@archlinux> In-Reply-To: <20200717043050.GB71700@mithril> References: <140a6398-f8ad-ecd6-2a6f-5ca28f570a64@gmail.com> <20200717043050.GB71700@mithril>
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On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 06:30:50 +0200, Jacques Foucry wrote: >My wife does not want to use Linux. But, I installed devuan (debian >without systemd) on her new PC, then VirtualBOX and wind8.1 on it. She >happy with this configuration and so I. Hi, my mileage varies a lot. I'm happy, too, that I do not need to run Windows on bare metal, but I'm not happy that I must run Windows software at all, since even running Windows in a VM, under an "emulation" or open source alternatives of the required Windows software in my experiences is a PITA. Years ago (2013) I bought a relatively expensive audio card, a RME HDSPe AIO which didn't (and still doesn't) work properly on my Linux installs. To check if it was caused by an incompatibility or by broken hardware I needed at least one other operating system running on bare metal. That was the first time I installed FreeBSD (FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE amd64) and since it was a relatively new driver and a card not much used by the FreeBSD community, I could contribute back by editing the audio wiki (https://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound). Since it's longer than 90 days ago, I can't provide a link to the edit. Fortunately the card was better supported by FreeBSD. However, I still wanted Windows for tests with the proprietary driver and software for it's internal mixer. Nowadays I don't have got a Windows install on bare metal, but run a XP (XP is unused), Win 7 and Win 10 VBox guests on an Arch Linux host and I've also 4 wine prefixes. Each time new guest additions are installed to my Win 10 guest I need to manually edit its vbox file to remove a non-existing "<DVDImage>". I don't need to do it for the other guests. Each update of Vbox involves the risk to break things. A few hours ago I needed to migrate from VBoxVGA to VBoxSVGA, see https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/19719 and this was neither the first, nor the most time consuming issue I experienced. Each time I update wine(or wine-staging) it asks to install mono and gecko. A few days back I accidentally pushed "Install" instead of "Cancel" when it asked to install mono. I hope I got rid of it by removing wine's cache and restoring one of the 4 prefixes from a backup. I still keep several temporary backups (named TRASH) of my attempt to remove mono. ls -hld .wine* TRASH* drwxr-xr-x 4 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K Jul 16 21:20 .wine drwxr-xr-x 4 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K Apr 28 10:44 .wine-gr-55-20200413 drwxr-xr-x 4 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K May 15 2019 .wine-sf drwxr-xr-x 4 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K Mar 21 10:46 .wine-xnviewmp drwxr-xr-x 2 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K Jul 15 23:42 TRASH.cache.wine.BAK drwxr-xr-x 4 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K Jul 16 19:58 TRASH.wine.2.BAK drwxr-xr-x 4 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K Jul 15 23:49 TRASH.wine.BAK drwxr-xr-x 4 rocketmouse rocketmouse 4.0K Jul 16 20:29 TRASH.wine.ORIGINAL IOW sometimes Windows is indispensable. Sometimes a user must have an install on bare metal, but even if it's not required to run on bare metal, Windows could easily become a PITA. I considered migrating to another VM, but no other VM is that easy to set up as VBox regarding access to the GUI and shared folder usage. Each kind of VM or "emulation" has got it's pitfalls. Open source alternatives often don't work as expected. After fixing https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice/issues/828 the usage of ifuse corrupted data on one of my iPads, by just _reading_ the data, so I'm back to iTunes running on my Windows guests. Apart from running two versions (an old that works and an untested new version) of a guitar synth editor under wine, I also tested different releases, installed as binary blob as well as compiled from source for Linux. The tested Linux releases were terribly broken. I installed, but didn't test the latest Linux release. ls -hl /usr/local/bin/gr-55_floorboard* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Apr 30 2018 /usr/local/bin/gr-55_floorboard -> /opt/gr-55_floorboard/packager/GR-55FloorBoard -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 114 Apr 27 09:17 /usr/local/bin/gr-55_floorboard_2018-4_wine -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 129 Apr 27 09:17 /usr/local/bin/gr-55_floorboard_2020-4_wine cat /usr/local/bin/gr-55*wine #!/bin/dash wine '/home/rocketmouse/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/GR-55FloorBoard/GR-55FloorBoard.exe' & exit #!/bin/dash wine '/home/rocketmouse/.wine-gr-55-20200413/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/GR-55FloorBoard/GR-55FloorBoard.exe' & exit ls -hld /opt/gr-55* drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 12K Apr 28 08:35 /opt/gr-55_floorboard drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 12K Apr 30 2018 /opt/gr-55_floorboard_obsolete_version_20180418 Regards, Ralf
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