Hobbit doors part one

I believe I have ran into an issue with my idea of creating a hobbit door for my bedroom. It has to do with bending wood. 

The best way to bend wood into a few partial circles , and then join them together to make a frame is through controlled application of hot water, steam and pressure. Creating this amount of hot water and pressure will require an outdoor trough or something else, that I just don't have room for. 

I will probably be doing some searching on alternatives to this little problem soon. Other than the curved frame, I believe I have the rest of the door figured out, I just need to put down on paper, check my mental measurements and begin. 

Creating a Tiny Core Linux virtual machine

Creating a Tiny Core Linux Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

Tiny Core Linux

Tiny Core Linux (TCL) is a very small Linux distribution.  I find it useful on older hardware and as a quick testing machine for virtual networks.  Let’s get a copy of TCL and create a virtual machine now shall we.  This tiny operating system makes it easy for us to get an idea of how VirtualBox works, and to introduce Linux to someone who has never used it.  It is different than any of the mainstream Linux distributions, but it is functional for our purposes.

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Tiny Core Linux lives at http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html and from there we can find the “downloads” link.  When we click on that, we will get the three versions to select from.  They are Core, TinyCore, and CorePlus.  I will be using CorePlus for this as I sometimes install this on laptops that use somewhat older wireless network adapters, and it just has more stuff without being huge.  The download is rather quick as the entire thing is actually tiny compared to most of the things we will download when we create our virtual network later.

A few words on ISO files

What we are currently downloading is a file ending with the extension “ISO”.  If you are not sure what an ISO file is, it is basically an image of a disk.  A while back, we would download ISO files, decompress and burn these images to a shiny CD or DVD using the “burn image” feature of certain CD and DVD burning software.  I would then use that to install an operating system on a physical computer.  Now we usually copy the ISO image contents to a bootable USB flash drive using various tools.  These tools make the USB flash drive bootable and they extract the ISO image onto the USB flash drive.  To be completely honest, I do still burn some ISO files on to shiny disks because I still have some older computers that do not boot from USB devices.  

There are a few different tools available for creating bootable USB flash drives, but I mostly use UNetbootin for Linux ISO files or Windows USB/DVD Tool from Microsoft when I am creating USB flash drives with versions of Windows.   As our goal is to create virtual machines, we just use VirtualBox to handle all of this.

Setting up the Virtual Machine

Now that we have our ISO, let’s create the virtual machine that it will run on.  This is the virtual version of a real machine.

Launch VirtualBox and click on the top left where it says “New”.  You will be presented with a box that wants you to enter some basic information.  If you start typing “TinyCore” into the name section, you will notice that the type and version automatically fill to “Linux” and “Oracle (64-bit)”.  If you have a 32-bit PC, then yours may default to version “Oracle (32-bit)”.  Press next after you have chosen your version and you will be taken to a screen where you decide how much RAM to dedicate to your new machine.  

The new virtual machine should have enough RAM to function properly without using too many system resources.  Mine defaults to 768 megabytes and that seems right for a quick install of Tiny Core Linux.

The next screen asks us to create a hard disk.  The default for my install is 12.00 GB and that works well for me as we are not going to put much on this virtual machine.  It can be less, but I would not go below 4.0 GB just to be safe.

The next step will ask us what sort of virtual disk we want to use.  I always use VDI disks, for no reason other than it is the default.  I have not looked into the other formats available, so I can’t comment on what would be best for what purpose.

The next screen asks if we want our disks dynamically allocated or a fixed size.  For this, I always choose to have the disk dynamically allocated.  Like the disk types, I just do this because it’s the default.  I do the same for the next screen that asks for a file location and a size.

We now have a virtual machine called “TinyCore” listed on the left of our VirtualBox window.  If you click to highlight this machine, and choose “Settings” in the window above, you will see other settings that you can look at.  We will be changing some of those later, but for now all the defaults should work properly.  

We can either double click the virtual machines name in the column, or click to highlight and press the green start arrow in VirtualBox and the virtual machine will begin its power up.  Luckily, VirtualBox will see that we have no operating system, and it will prompt us to insert a start-up disk.  This will be the Tiny Core ISO file that we downloaded earlier.

Click on the folder with the green upward arrow and browse to your “downloads” location so you can choose the tiny core ISO file.  After we select it, the virtual computer will boot off of that.  We are now running as if we have a physical computer, with a blank hard disk, running off of a CD.

After all of the text screens scroll by, choose the top option, “Boot Core Plus with default FLWS topside”.  Don’t worry about what this means yet.  When you either select this, or wait 60 seconds for it to select itself, you will be taken to the GUI (Graphical User Interface).

If you click in your virtual machine, your mouse will be “captured” and you will be able to move the cursor in Tiny Core.  To release your mouse and keyboard back to your windows PC, press the right “Ctrl” key on your keyboard.  This key can be changed if you need it, but I find the right “Ctrl” to work well.

Congratulations, you now have a fully functional machine within your other machine.  Now we need to stop running off the CD and install the operating system onto your virtual hard drive.  To do that in Tiny Core, click the small screw head in the bottom line of icons that says “TC_Install” when you hover over it.  This will begin the installer program.  Let’s go through the options quickly.

The menu that a show up has a few options, what we want is “Frugal”, “Whole Disk”, and “sda”, and “install boot loader”.  The next two screens, I just choose the defaults.  

The following screen will give you the option to install Wi-Fi, ndswrapper, and other things.  Even if you are on a laptop with Wi-Fi, or a desktop with Wi-Fi (like I am), you don’t want to choose these options because VirtualBox creates a virtual wired connection.  Therefore, whatever you install will think it’s on a wired network connection, not a wireless.  This virtual wired adapter goes through your computers existing connection to connect to the internet.  Therefore, so long as your physical machine has an internet connection, your virtual machine will have one as well.

Let’s look at this from the other direction.  Your windows PC will see the VirtualBox software as just another application that needs internet access.  Your windows PC will just give it access through its programming just as if it was Skype, OneNote , or any other application that uses the internet.  The VirtualBox program creates fake (or “virtual”) wired connections from your virtual machines out to the internet but does not tell windows what it is doing, and Windows thinks it’s just allowing another application to access the internet.   Just as I don’t have to configure wireless settings for every application that uses the internet, I don’t have to configure these settings for each virtual machine.

Let’s get back to the install.  There will be a review screen that pops up, and we want to make sure that we are using “Type: frugal”, “Target:sda”, “Format: ext4”, “ Options: Install X GUI”.  If these are your settings choose proceed, if not choose the back arrow and make the needed changes.

Installation should go rather fast, but there is no popup window that tells you it is done.  All we get is the last line of that window that says “Installation has completed”.  We can close this window and select the power button on the bottom row of icons.  We will get exit options, and we want to make sure “Shutdown” is selected and click “OK”.  This should power down our Tiny Core machine.

Now we must remove the virtual CD from the virtual machine.   To do this, left click on the Tiny Core machine listed in VirtualBox.  From there, choose “Settings”.  From there we want to choose “Storage” and select the drive that contains our ISO file (not the .VDI file as that is our virtual hard drive).  From there, we can click the picture of the shiny disk next to the “Optical Drive” box and choose the last option, “Remove Virtual Disk From Drive”.  This is exactly like it says, it is as though we physically removed a disk from a DVD ROM device.   Click OK when done.  We now have a virtual machine with Tiny Core hopefully properly installed on the hard disk, and no CD rom in the drive.

Now we can double click the Tiny Core computer to power on our virtual machine again.  

You should now have a virtual Tiny Core Linux machine running. Enjoy.

Installing VirtualBox on Windows 10

We will now be installing Oracle VirtualBox on our Windows 10 Computer.  VirtualBox is the software that I will be using to create virtual machines.  I really enjoy using virtual machines for testing purposes and just to try out new Linux versions, create Linux and Windows servers for testing, and just because I find the entire virtual PC concept so fascinating.

There are other options out there for running virtual machines, but the laptop I was using a couple years ago did not support Microsoft Hyper-V, so VirtualBox was the first virtualization software that I used.

Maybe we should take a step back and try to quickly define what a virtual machine without going too deep.  A virtual machine is simply a computer that exists within your existing computer.  VirtualBox basically pretends to be a computer with all the hardware that you specify. When you install Linux or Windows within VirtualBox your install program thinks that it’s running on an actual physical computer.  If that sounded a bit convoluted, I’m sorry. Stick with me and all will be revealed.

Getting to know your computer

The first thing we need to do is become acquainted with computer that we are using.  The main thing we need to know is whether we are using a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system, and how much memory we have to work with.  

This is important because if we have a 32-bit operating system, and not a 64-bit computer running a 64 bit operating system, we cannot create a 64-bit virtual machine.  I could go really geeky with this, but let’s just say that almost all recent computers are 64 bit.  

You may also want to go into your computer’s BIOS settings and see if hardware virtualization is available and turned on, but that goes beyond the scope of what we are doing here.  Hardware virtualization can make things run a lot better, but is not completely necessary to run VirtualBox.  I would suggest you look up how to do it on your computer if you feel comfortable getting into your system setup.

Let’s get started on how to find out what sort of operating system you have.  Click on the start flag and choose “Settings”.  In the screen that comes up, choose “System”.  Scroll all the way to the bottom and choose “About”.

In the window that opens, you should see two things that are rather important to know, one is your installed RAM.  In the illustration you will note that I have 10.0 GB.  The other is the System Type.  In the illustration below, you will see that I have a 64-bit operation system with an 64-bit processor.  These are good.  Now we know we can create 64-bit virtual machines.

If your computer is not 64-bit, then you will just have to stick with 32-bit versions of operating systems to install.  This will be a slight problem later as the newest versions of the Centos operating system and many other operating systems no longer support 32 bit systems.  

If you also have less than 3.5 GB of ram, you may also run into a problem later, but I wouldn’t fret too much unless you are actually less than 2 GB, like the small tablets that I use quite often.  Virtual machines use your systems RAM for themselves, so if I create a virtual machine on this machine with its 9.88 GB usable RAM, and the virtual machine is set up to use 2.0 GB of RAM, then I will have 7.88 left available to my computer.  Luckily, virtual machines seem to take less ram than the advertised minimum hardware requirements for a physical machine.

Now that we know a bit about our physical machine, we can download and install the version of VirtualBox that will work with our machine.

Downloading VirtualBox

VirtualBox is available at VirtualBox.org and is free to use.  To obtain your copy, go to www.virtualbox.org.  As websites seem to be a bit fluid and change quite often, your exact procedures after you get there may be different than what you see here.  Find where it says “Downloads” and it should take you to a page where it lists the different versions for your system. As we are here to install on Windows 10, let’s choose the version for Windows Hosts.  Right now, the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are the same installer, so let’s choose that one.

When you choose that one, the Edge browser will ask to save or run the download.  I like to download first and then run when I want to, but maybe that’s just me.  As I have a somewhat slower connection, we have a few minutes to do some other things, so let’s talk a bit about hyper-v.

A few words on Hyper-V

A few terms you may hear tossed around is “Hyper-V”, hardware virtualization, Intel VT-x, and AMD-V technologies.  Let’s take these one at a time.

Hyper-V is Microsoft’s virtualization technology that comes with certain versions of Windows.  It is big, powerful, incredibly flexible, and I don’t use it other than on a few enterprise servers.  You may be wondering why we don’t use that for our virtual machines.  All I can say is  that I have experience with VirtualBox as it would run on my computers running the Windows 7 Home versions and my Linux computers.  The other reason is that there are a lot of good training materials, blogs, and videos out there for it, and it’s rather easy to use.

Hardware virtualization  

Hardware virtualization is accomplished by using special circuits found in the hardware in your physical computer.  Your computer may or may not support it, but if you enable it, it seems to make the virtual machines run a bit smoother.  Luckily, VirtualBox no longer requires hardware virtualization technology to run properly.  So, if you are not sure if your virtualization hardware is turned on, after you download VirtualBox, reboot your computer, go into your BIOS settings (usually by pressing Esc, delete, or some other key when your computer first comes back on) and see if you have hardware virtualization available as an option under some sort of advanced settings.  Just play around until you find it, or go online and find out if your machine actually supports it and how to turn it on.

Intel VT-x and AMD-V hardware

The terms Intel VT-x and AMD-V are two of the technologies that computer manufacturers enable your hardware to share resources easily with virtual machines.  One is for Intel processors; the other is for AMD processors. You may also hear some other versions of these terms like "V-Pro", but these are all marketing terms for the same class of hardware assisted virtualization technology.

I do want to mention again that VirtualBox does not require hardware virtualization to function properly, but may function better with it enabled. Let's get back to our install.

Installing VirtualBox

Now that we have downloaded the software, let’s get it installed.  If you had to reboot to check your system for hardware virtualization, then you will need to find your downloaded VirtualBox.  If you are using the Edge browser, you can click the strange version of a hamburger menu that will bring up the “Hub”, and then click the downward facing arrow.

Click on the word VirtualBox and it will begin the installer.  As of this writing, there’s no good way to tell that you have clicked on the download, it does not change color, or do anything else to tell you that it is starting until the installer window actually pops up. You may also get a security warning asking if you intended to install this software, so long as it’s the real version from virtualbox.org, just click OK.

Now you can step your way through the installer steps.  From what I’ve seen, all of the defaults work fine.  You will get a warning that your network connection may be affected for a bit.  I have never had much trouble with this, even when streaming audio or video while installing.

I have never ran across an actual problem that was a “deal killer” when installing any newer version of VirtualBox, but it has been a while since I have tried to install it on any strange or under-powered machines.  The installer seems to be very mature and just runs very well. The problem you will find on under-powered machines is the lack of processing power and RAM for your virtual machine.

Once your install is finished, go ahead and launch VirtualBox just to make sure all went well.  There are a few changes that I like to make, just to keep things simple for me later.

Customizing VirtualBox

The main bit of customization that I do is defining my default locations for virtual machines.  I have a computer that has a small but fast “C:” drive, and a large second drive that is for bulk storage.  Due to the size of some of some of the machines that I create, I use this drive (“F:”) to store the virtual machine files, my ISO files (images of the installation DVDs for various operating systems), and a place to store other files that I will be sharing between the various virtual machines.  Yes, we can share stuff between our physical machine and the virtual machines.

To set this up, click on “File”, then “Preferences”.

In the window that opens, you can change the “Default Machine Folder” setting to whatever you want to use.   As you can see, I use a folder called F:\VMS.

That’s all of the customization that I do right out of the box, but it keeps everything in order.  I just make sure that this folder is backed up to an external drive after I make virtual machines that I want to keep.   I do not back this drive up to a cloud service just because of size.

I hope your VirtualBox software is running properly, and next time we will download and install a sample operating system in VirtualBox just to get an idea of how it is working.

Thank you,

Shawn

Cleaning the blog

After realizing that i had many posts on here that were not relevant to why I have this blog, I cleaned things up a bit.  I will still have to get in here and change the categories and whatnot, but that may be a task for another day.

A fresh new blog, that's what I am hoping to accomplish over this weekend.  I actually have a lot of digital debris from the courses I have taken, the various things I have been studying, and other odd experiments.

The new year will be a bit more crisp and clean for me.  I believe the last post I had on here was "back to my roots" or something of that nature, and that is what I am going to try and accomplish over the next year.  I want to get trained up and certified not in the oddball tech that I've been subjecting myself to, but the portions of tech that interest me enough to do a true deep dive in.

So, here's to the first part of "cleaning up the digital clutter" and focusing on what will be done.

Generic Non PNP Monitor problem with Windows 7

If you do enough Windows 7 installs with older hardware, you will run into this problem eventually.  My latest encounter with this error happened when installing an HP vp17 Monitor on a newer Dell Windows 7 Pro machine.  The system would see the HP as a Generic Non PNP monitor.  When it does this, there are only two or three video resolutions available.  Sometimes the environment that you are installing in requires a display resolution that is not one of the few listed.  In my case, I needed a resolution of 1024x768 for a custom full screen application.  You may need something different, but the concept is the same.

So what's going on here?  Put simply, the monitor is not able to tell the PC what it is.  My HP couldn't or wouldn't communicate it's model information to Windows. This could be caused by cable issues, drivers, or actual monitor issues.

The first step is to look for and replace or bypass any sort of extension cable or older monitor cable.  80% of the time (especially is you are working will well seasoned equipment) it will be an older cable issue because not all the required pins are connected.  Testing this may involve actually moving the monitor closer to the PC so it can be direct cabled if at all possible (eliminate the suspects).

If that does not work, then updating the drives seems to be suggested (FYI: This has never worked for me).  While you are at it, update Windows to the newest and latest service packs that your environment will handle.

If there is still no joy, as with my HP, then you may be forced to replace the monitor.  Luckily the site that I was on had a few other monitors used for other purposes, so a swap was rather simple.

So, if you get the error:
1- Replace the cable, do a shortened cable test.
2- Update Windows as far as you can
3- Load new drivers for the monitor and video controller.
4- Replace the monitor.

I may never know whether there was an issue with the HP monitor, or if there is some complex workaround to make it work.  I did a few searches and found others with the same issue, and the threads either died unresolved, or ended with the questionable monitor being replaced.  As a technician, you can't spend too much time chasing issues like this before you simply have to come up with a way to make something work.  If there were no monitors on site, I would have been forced to use a FRU (Field Replaceable Unit), or talk to them about purchasing a newer monitor.

Good Luck!
Shawn

I wonder why I never put a title on this.

Just making sure the blog is still alive :-)

Hey look, a fern.

I am still a bit on the fence on this blogging thing.  For me, the things really holding me back are a lack of time and a lack of focus on what to put in this blog.
Therefore, I will try to create a couple other blogs that will track my path over the next year and maybe one for random technology tidbits that I often collect.

second post

this is a test to see how the new posts will look.  Wondering about how to put them in categories.

caption goes here

I am also going to put in a photo on the left.  Let's see how this works out.  Actually, I'll move it to the right.

how is spelling on this.  seems to work.  automatic capitalization seems to be an issue.

let's see what a jump break is: