Today's Desktop 2021-01-24

Lately I have been running 64 bit XP on my desktop. Yeah, you heard me. The trouble is that it was acting a little strange when mousing. No, not that kind of mousing... the kind where I try to click on stuff. If I long-clicked it would usually work, but short-clicks typically did not. Right-clicking was fine, and so was wheel clicking. I knew it wasn't because of my crappy old mouse since it worked fine on my laptop. Some garbage driver problem I guess. Time to try Devuan again eh?

I pulled out my Devuan CD and started the install while looking for instructions for a minimal xfce desktop environment to put on it. I didn't quite follow the instructions but I did put most of that stuff on there. I used xdm instead of slim and I sure didn't put any of the cinnacrap in there. The gvfs and policykit seems to work well enough with hotplug devices but wine is a mess, file associations are a bigger mess, using an editor other than NPP is not an option, and VirtualBox is an ugly Oracle-owned pig. So I tried VMWare Player. Which worked... except for the VMWare Tools install. So I tried virt-manager, which installed but failed to create a virtual machine with some bullshit error message that led me a bunch of forums posts that got me nowhere. That is until I spotted this one. That's right, if the ISO you want to use for installing your guest OS is on a Samba/CIFS share (that is fancy talk for "windows" share) then it runs through the whole guest creation wizard and then barfs at the end with no mention of permissions or Samba or even the ISO. Sorry, if it is that ugly about something so simple then I can't wait around to find out what else will fail. What is even more pathetic is that the bug was around for a year an a half, after which it was simply closed because there was a new version of Fedora being released and I guess that is a good enough reason to close all outstanding bugs for the existing version. :-(

So, I went crawling back to VirtualBox. I have Guild Wars [in wine] and a couple of browsers in my Devuan install, as well as Ásbrú Connection Manager and the old version of Keepass. I also added MPV as a media player, partly because I am still holding a grudge against VLC for the stupid santa hat crap, and partly because I love the screenshot of Sterling Hayden MPV uses on their home page. Speaking of photos... here's a cello I picked up for a buddy of mine recently. Click on the images for full size pics.

In the case.

Out of the case.

Anyways, the remainder of my applications are in a VirtualBox based VM running 32 bit XP. This post is actually being written on that VM in Notepad++ [I had to use v7.4.2] through a WinSCP session to the web server. My IRC client dxirc is running in the background and I am just trying to come to peace with the idea that it is all running in VirtualBox. Don't worry, it probably won't last very long and I'll have to write another rant about how I had to switch to MacOS or something.