So how, in Linux (specifically Mint 20.1 Cinnamon) do I pin an app to the taskbar or whatever it's called?
a) MacOS - simple, just drop it on the Dock where you want it. Use drag/drop to reorganise your Dock icons
b) Win7 - Simple, just drop it on the taskbar where you want it. Harder to reorganise.
c) Win10 - Similar to Win7
d) Mint 20.1 - blowed if I could find a way to do it.
e) RPi - even worse.
I already have dual-boot with linux on a windows xp machine, but it's only a single processor so slow by modern comparison so don't really use it at all except for powering up once a week to keep the battery charged.
Have used linux in a number of contracts.
So you mean 'powering it up' rather than 'booting it up' as isn't MoBo partially powered (and so the BIOS / CMOS battery), assuming it's an ATX machine?
Ah, cool, but nothing like actually trying to use it as your own daily desktop to see if it will work for you or not. ;-)
Cheers, T i m
No but I've apparently turned the screen upside down or sideways before, but as I cannot see it its only seen by an unblind person. grin.
Brian
Don't you right click on the app in the menu and do it from there (from memory)? I thought you got the choice of taskbar (or whatever it's called) or desktop?
It's funny, one of the things that pissed me off about MacOS (at the time possibly) was the inability to create a simple text file on the desktop. It was also as easy as it always has been on Windows on Mint until I think recently, where they seem to have dropping such things off. You can generally add them back on again with come CLI Copy>Paste wizardry. (Like being able to open a folder as Admin from the GUI / File Manager (Nemo?), you have to add that back manually).
That's hardware though, all the rest were OS's?
Cheers, T i m
Whilst I've run Linux in a VB VM and container, it all adds to the complexity and more of a risk of trashing the host OS by mistake than running say a live DVD/USB or even running it on a USB attached drive (once installed etc).
And that can then cause an issue for Windows. ;-(
Yes, it is easier running it on a VM for that.
That's what I do here on a couple of PC's. I have removable SATA drives and can mix n match easily with no risk to the 'other' OS's.
Yeah, I suggested that above and is something I have often left with others (LiveDVD) both for them and me either to play with on their machines or to use as an emergency repair tool.
I can generally get people to boot a LiveDVD (remotely, by phone etc), get online (if Wireless), download, 'install' and run Teamviewer (that is actually the Windows version running in WINE) and then get access to their machine, in one instance, actually installing Linux for them remotely. ;-)
Cheers, T i m
I've historically used VirtualBox. the Windows Sandbox doesn't provide access to USB devices so that's a no-no for me.
Is Hyper V a good alternative to VirtualBox?
For Tim, VirtualBox does have some 'pre-installed' OSes.
I've never used virtualbox so can't comment on it.
Hyper-v is bundled with Windows 10. You do have to enable it in the control panel and also enable virtualisation in the motherboard's BIOS.
Yes thats correct
Thta has not been my experience. as long as teh test OS is within a VM, I struggle to see how you can trash the Host OS? If you trash within the VM, thats OK as you can then delete the virtual machine and start again with a new VM.
No, I was talking about the Secure boot within the Hyper-v manaager for when you create the new VM, not the secure boot setting in teh BIOS which is for the Host OS.
Uh Huh.
Yes, like Hirens Boot CD or Darik's Boot 'n' Nuke!
Virtual Box is good, the main difference for me was that you couldn't start Virtual Box VMs automatically when the PC booted (well not easily). Where as with Hyper-V you could.
Nowadays I mainly use WSL2 and docker, but that doesn't have a gui interface so no good for testing the Linux desktop.
Pssst... There is WSLg available for beta testers and and Windows Preview subscribers...... so you can run Linux GUI applications
Granted not a particularly common scenario but one that happened.
I built BIL a PC running Ubuntu as a sort of feasibility exercise and had a Windows VM on there for his accounting app. After using it for some time, he applied a big windows update, the virtual drive allocation filled the remaining space on the host OS and it all ground to a nasty halt. The VM got corrupted (as well) and he never recovered the data from it.
Sure.
Oh, ok. Never used Hyper-V etc.
<snip>
Well, I have left those with people as well, but even a straight Live LinuxDVD/USB can be of good use at times.
<snip>Cheers, T i m
Hehe.
Cheers, T i m
Some of the visual settings can be seen here.
Hyper-V requires EPT/SLAT on client PCs. Hyper-V does not require EPT/SLAT on Windows server.
The difference is that the frame rate of gaming needs some help, when Hyper-V is involved, and so EPT/SLAT (Second Level Address Translation in hardware) is a hardware requirement of the processor.
Hyper-V in Windows Features, won't install unless EPT/SLAT is detected. EPT is the Intel name for it. SLAT is the AMD name for it. I only have one PC in the house that can run Hyper-V (today).
Microsoft pushed out a patch on Patch Tuesday, that caused the frame rate of gaming setups to drop. Which... naturally makes you suspicious of what they're up to this week.
The problem is, Microsoft has decided they need "containerization" for the OS. They use Hyper-V for WSL2, WSLg, VirtualBox 6 runs under Hyper-V. Hyper-V will be used for various Defender features. But, in order to widely deploy Hyper-V, they need to remove the requirement for EPT/SLAT, without pissing off gamers who are running Windows 10. Now would a gamer be using Windows 10 in the first place ? That, I don't know.
Paul
VirtualBox does handle some exception conditions with grace. When a machine is booting up, if it runs out of RAM the Guest will enter Pause state and wait for you to "fix it", by freeing up some RAM. You can then "UnPause" and it continues running.
But running out of storage, that's just not a best practice. I keep around 100GB of slack on the VM storage partition. in the hopes I never screw one into the ground like that. It happens, but usually on throwaways that I'm running. It doesn't usually happen on anything that matters.
I trust you know how to "compact" a VM.
Disk Management has a compact for VHD files. But I have my own favorite way of doing that. I use Virtual PC, which has VHD as the native format, and it has a Compact on it. The nice thing about it, is it doesn't mess up any identifiers on the VHD. I've had identifiers messed up before during compaction, so I have to be careful what methods I use.
Windows 10 has CleanMgr.exe, and the system button will throw up an entry for Windows.old, and you can remove Windows.old after an Upgrade install. After the space is consolidated (JKDefrag), you can do your sdelete run and zero out the white space on C: . Then, the "compact" operation will shrink the VM down.
My Win10 VMs with dynamic VHD storage, at the moment.
W20H2.vhd 13,830,032,384 bytes
W10-1903.vhd 23,405,868,032 bytes
Just to give some idea of the size range I run. I'm not compacting these every day, but they do get a bit of fluffing now and then, to free up a bit of disk space.
Paul
I'm sure it does. ;-)
Ok.
Quite. Unfortunately this was an 'experimental' instaklation that was remote to be and ended up getting used for longer than we first envisaged. There were possibly 'Running out of space' warnings but the user non-technical ... and once committed to the update ...
Ah, but that involves 'looking' Paul. ;-)
No, never had it come up (myself).
So is this just removing any whitespace in a dynamic drive?
See above.
As mentioned, I have found VM's to be sufficiently 'tender' at times so that now I'd rather swap out a complete drive than bother with them.
Yeah, I often do that on any system that's tight for disk space I'm working on for someone.
Ok.
This Mac Mini with a 160GB HDD has 60GB for OSX and 100 for XP and currently has <checks> 338MB free. ;-(
Cheers, T i m
Interesting, but I'm not that fussed really. I like WSL2, it gets around the previous fuss of running Hyper-V or VisualBox, I just don't have to think about it. It's just kind of there when I want it.
I'm not really bothered about a Linux GUI at the moment, I can work on Win10 and develop for Linux without needing a Linux Gui.
You'll have to do your compaction on another machine then. I sometimes move the VM files around the LAN here, where there's more storage. To do compaction, even when a compaction tool says "overwrite initial file", it still needs double the space.
Like, to compact the 13GB file, it needs 13GB for the original file, 13GB for the output file, then the original can be deleted at some point in time. You need at least as much slack as the file currently uses, to do compaction.
Some of the tools for this, use that sort of pessimistic estimate. They know the compacted file cannot be any bigger than 13GB, so they insist 13GB of slack be present, before they start. Even if the output file happened to end up at 10GB in size.
It is probably possible for a compaction tool to do real live honest-to-goodness compaction-in-place, but if the operation fails, you're screwed. This is why a separate file handle is used for the output. It's in case the power goes off or something similarly naughty.
Anyway, there is a maintenance procedure, and I've saved 200GB of wasted space on the VM partition, just by house cleaning in this way. You can zero out white space on both Windows and Linux, and both kinds of machines benefit from compaction. (Compaction is Guest OS agnostic. What counts, is zeroing out some storage to make it happen, or make it possible. It costs nothing to store zeros, using VM disk containers.)
Paul
I ran it here. A Linux window on Windows 10, resizes via the lower-right corner. The resize of a window is a bit janky and is not smooth. Here, I'm running Firefox for Linux as seen in Ubuntu 20.04 WSLg. When a Linux graphical program is running, the icon in the Task Bar contains a tiny penguin overlaid on the icon. The OS used, is an Insider version.
Paul
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