#nobridge
In some cases they look for generic virtual hw devices, in other cases things like available cpu flags or BIOS version.
There are ways to hide it though:
https://github.com/zhaodice/qemu-anti-detection
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-do-i-hide-the-fact-to-windows-that-it-runs-in-a-vm.115627/
No idea to be honest, been a long time since I ran Windows at home.
Can always use the Windows 10 LTSC 2021 iso to create the Windows To Go. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-10-enterprise
Getting a proper license is gonna be impossible as a private consumer though, or well you can probably find someone selling the product keys online for cheap but that isn’t a real sales channel and it could suddenly become deactivated by Microsoft. I can find sites illegally selling them for as low as $14 when doing a quick search.
The real way to get the license is to sign up for their Volume Licensing Program.
Windows Enterprise LTSC is available in the per-user and per-device model, depending on the Volume Licensing program through which it’s acquired.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-licensing#windows-desktop-offerings-available-through-commercial-licensing
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/vlsc-faqs-home-page
Using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) and a fast USB thumbdrive, such as Kingston DataTraveler Max - https://www.storagereview.com/review/kingston-datatraveler-max-review, you can make a “Windows To Go” installation.
Now you have a Windows install that you can boot directly from the thumbdrive when the need arise.
Perfect for booting up if your bios can’t updated directly from the usb drive and forces you into Windows, or to run that one software you can’t replace just yet and that refuses your attempts to run with wine.
Just make sure that it’s an ssd usb thumbdrive or it’s gonna be too slow to be any use.
Personally I’ve upvoted the replies as they keep a relevant and interesting discussion going.
I believe that both proprietary non-free systems and fully free systems can exist and that having licensing alternatives like GPL, LGPL and MIT gives the developer options for specifying how their software is to be used.
The movement towards using MIT or LGPL instead of the full GPL for libraries thus allowing the developers using the libraries the freedom to choose what license their software should use is one I can stand behind.
If someone builds a FLOSS turbotax competitor and don’t want anyone to use their hard work and fork it into a commercial and proprietary product then I believe there should be a license for that.
If they rather earn money from it and copyrights their code instead that is also their prerogative.
The middle-ground where they create a free turbotax competitor with a license that allows others to fork it into a proprietary software should also be possible - although I personally don’t see the allure.
That question is kind a rabbit hole and not one I feel confident in going down.
Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
The real world implications of non-free software is that other’s can’t run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
I like having computing alternatives that are free from corporate control and believe that the hardliners like FSF helps us keep those alternatives alive. I realise that those alternatives are in many ways worse and that a lot of hardware today requires the vendor blobs to work. When/If corporations push their control even further I want those alternatives to be around.
And you really should pay for winrar. ;-)
Not in this case, the tests they’re running doesn’t need the vendor blobs in those testing folders.
Generally I agree with Debians changes to include nonfree firmware in the default images and making the “completely free” images the non-default version. I do think maintaining and having completely free distro versions to be a good thing though.
The whole situation is really unnecessary because none of the things that we’re testing really requires those vendor blobs.
We’re just testing the basic vboot and CBFS structures in those images, the file contents are not really relevant as long as they match the signatures.
So I think the easiest option here is to just remove the offending CBFS files from those images / overwrite the offending FMAP sections with zeroes.
In this case the binaries with the nonfree software seem be completely unnecessary, so why not keep it free?
They were put there for some testing and from their mailing list it sounds like it will be removed as it’s unnecessary.
Apologies that this has caused problems for you.
This is just some old test data used to confirm that the parser in the command line utility works, and I don’t think anyone thought about the redistribution legality implications of putting those images into the repo.
I agree that it’s not a good situation and we should try to fix it.
There is no real reason for these binaries to be in those test fixtures — the point of the tests is just to verify parsing for vboot data structures, the actual contents of the file are not really relevant.
edit: “there is a general advisory committee made up of any individuals who wish to help out and discuss their thoughts with the leadership board. This is done at bi-weekly meetings, which all members of the project are invited to attend and contribute.”
https://coreboot.org/leadership.html
Uncertain if it has all the customization you want, but check out ArcMenu for GNOME
https://github.com/tau-OS/tau-arcmenu?tab=readme-ov-file
https://gitlab.com/arcmenu/ArcMenu
I stand corrected, .NET Core is open source and uses the MIT License.
As in
“We’ve finished taking all we need from the Mono project and implemented it into our proprietary .NET implementation for Linux, Android and iOS. Instead of getting flack for killing off Mono (which is open source and would’ve been forked anyways) we graciously give this old husk to the Wine project. We recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET. kthnxbye!”
Good thing that it went to Wine I guess, as they do lots of work to get old Windows programs up and running in Linux and that often involves Mono.
I’m only running a single eGPU + USB Controller passthrough and while it took some tinkering to get it started it has been smooth sailing afterwards. The B650 series of motherboards has mostly had good IOMMU groupings so there’s a good chance your motherboard will allow you to play around with some KVM/QEMU/VFIO if you wanna try gpu passthrough to a virtual machine.
Regarding Case: Generic I would look into getting one with dust protection (bottom and front) and preferably sound proofing. Having the dust get stuck outside the computer makes cleaning so much simpler and having a quiet computer is lovely.
Personally I’m a fan of the Fractal Design Define 7 but I imagine you can get a case with the dust protection and sound proofing much cheaper than that if you take the time to look around and read some reviews, especially if you don’t need E-ATX or multiple 3.5’’ disk slots.
Info that could help others help you:
House or flat?
Renting or owning?
How large an area do you need to heat?
How many rooms?
Temperature and savings:
Where I live they say that a house with people living in it should be at least 16°C (~60°F) to handle the moisture we generate.
Humans should have at least 18°C (64°F), preferably 20°C (68°F).
That means that you could close doors and let unoccupied rooms have lower temperature than the rooms you use.
If you’re stuck with space heaters then you’ll save quite a lot that way.
sending personal data to someone else’s computer.
I think this is spot on. I think it’s exciting with LLMs but I’m not gonna give the huge corporations my data, nor anyone else for that matter.
Telemetry, licensing and proprietary extensions in VS Code is the whole reason for VScodium to exist.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
For details follow the link. This is nothing more than the headlines.
Finances
The GNOME Foundation reserves policy says that the buffer is too low to run at a deficit any longer, which it has done for three years. This years budget is a break-even budget.
Strategy & Fundraising
A five year strategic plan has been prepared and a draft approved by the board. A variety of fundraising activies will be launched over the coming months.
Board Development
More directors are being added to reduce workload on individual board members. Non-voting officer seats will be added for the same reason.
Elections
Annual board elections is coming up, 6 seats are being elected.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort.
I mean you have the same functionality in LibreOffice Calc, the automatic sorting and filtering is called AutoFilter and the table style is chosen from AutoFormat Styles.
They say nothing about their distro having no upstream. If they make a distro based of Debian/Arch/Fedora I don’t see that as dismissing their efforts anymore than Nobara/SteamOS/Ubuntu/Mint does.
I rather they enforce their requirements on their own spin then try to force existing distros to implement said reqs. They should obviously donate to the foss community when using the technology the community maintain though!