Category Archives: Administrative

On The Road Again

We’re driving to Colorado for Thanksgiving, so not much posting before Wednesday. Meanwhile, if you have a subscription, I’m quoted in the Sunday edition of the Times of London. The subject is the race between Jeff’s tortoise and Elon’s hare.

[Update a while later, before hitting the road]

This is the quote from me: “‘It appears Bezos is finally getting serious,’ said Rand Simberg, a space industry consultant. ‘To this point, Blue Origin has looked more like a hobby. Jeff saw himself as the turtle to Elon’s hare — never realising that Elon was really the Duracell Bunny.'”

I actually said “Energizer,” but whatev.

More Virtualbox Problems

So, I’m running Fedora with Gnome. When I fire up Windows 10 in Virtualbox, the VB menu tabs appear at the bottom of the virtual machine, covering up the tray. Of I attempt to minimize it, it leaves the Windows window. When I reclick on it, the tabs are still there. If I try to close it, it freezes the host. I can switch workspaces, and windows, but I can’t do anything within them; clicking on links, or new tabs within a browser instance, does nothing. The cursor remains an arrow regardless of its location. The only way to fix it (that I’ve found so far) is to reboot, which is a PETA, because a lot of stuff has to be autoloaded each time.

Any ideas for troubleshooting?

[Saturday-afternoon update]

OK, I have discovered that I can unfreeze the host without having to reboot, by killing the VM process. So that will help. But it’s still not switching properly between full-screen and scaled modes. And I still have to modprobe the driver every time I reboot, or the machine won’t start.

Light Posting

We’re driving up to Sequoia and Yosemite this afternoon for a few days. We’ll have the laptop, but probably not much time to post. We haven’t been there in years, and the waterfalls should be spectacular with all of the continuing snow melt from the very wet winter. Mammoth continued to have skiing into August (they just closed).

Computer Weirdness

Since a recent update, my desktop has quit booting. I just says “Loading kernel,” with kernel number, and does nothing else. What’s worse is that I can’t even boot it from an external drive that I boot a Windows laptop with when I want to run Linux on it. The desktop doesn’t even recognize it as boot media, though it continues to work fine with the laptop.

[Sunday-afternoon update]

Patricia’s Windows 10 machine is the same MSI motherboard as mine, and I confirmed that it, too, does not recognize the external drive as bootable. I went back into Windows, and created a live-USB for Fedora, which did boot into both her machine and mine.

So, I decided to just create a new installation. I put it on a spare Samsung 250G SSD that I had. It has no problem installing it, but when I tried to boot from it, at first I couldn’t even see it in the boot menu in the BIOS. I changed from UEFI to CSM, at which point it appeared, and I made it the first boot. But when I tried to boot it, I got the same error message as when I tried to boot from the external drive. The machine continues to not recognize a Fedora boot disk as bootable.

[Bumped]

[Update Monday afternoon]

OK, after talking to MSI, I found out that I had been setting the boot order wrong, and finally got it working. I’m pretty much back to normal, except I need to clone the Samsung over to my M.2. If I didn’t keep /home on a separate drive, though, I’d be in a world of hurt.

[Bumped]