In some of my circles, I am seen as the “technical” person, which means that all sorts of questions get sent my way.
I have always thought that I am a pretty poor choice for a teacher, because you know how teachers say “there are no stupid questions”? Well, even if I wouldn’t say it to your face, I most certainly feel I have been asked stupid stupid questions.
I wanted to write a quick blog post explaining what I think makes a good and a bad question.
Libreboot is a user-friendly distribution of coreboot. Coreboot is free and open source firmware for desktop computers.
The Dell Latitude E6400 is a recommended laptop for Librebooting because it can be internally flashed and it doesn’t require vendor file injection.
To change the firmware on a computer, you can flash externally, by opening up your computer and using a flash programmer to overwrite your motherboard’s ROM chip. Alternatively, you can do internal flashing, which means flashing from inside the OS, from within software. This means using the internal programmer on your motherboard, rather than an external one. Only some mainboards support internal flashing of Libreboot.
These are my notes on setting up a Windows 11 VM using virt-manager. This is assuming that virt-manager is already set up; I wrote notes on how to set up virt-manager on Artix Linux here.
Firstly, obtain a Windows 11 iso. You can download from Microsoft here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11
Microsoft blocks VPN users from downloading Windows 11. If you are a VPN user, or if you just don’t want to download from Microsoft’s servers, MASSGRAVE is a reputable source of genuine Windows isos.
These are my notes for setting up virt-manager with QEMU/KVM on Artix Linux. I’m using runit, but anything runit-specific should be easily converted to other init systems/service managers.
This is largely the same as tomit4’s instructions, but I’m doing networking over a bridge rather than a NAT.
Firstly, install relevant packages:
# pacman -S qemu virt-manager virt-viewer vde2 openbsd-netcat libvirt libvirt-runit
If you need virtualised TPM (e.g. for Windows 11), you also need to install swtpm. Also, for Windows VMs in general,
install virtio-win from the AUR for virtio drivers for Windows guests.
For those of you who don’t know, Student Finance England provide free printers to more or less all disabled students via their Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) funding. The printer they provide is a Canon PIXMA TR4755i (or at least, it was for me).
Printers are known for being rather unreliable pieces of technology, particularly on Linux (although, historically, I’ve honestly found printers to work much more reliably and without need for troubleshooting on Linux than Windows). So I was quite concerned when the government sent me a free printer, that I would not be able to use it. Luckily, after a few short hours of wrangling things, I managed to get it working via USB (I’ve not tried network printing, but will update this post once I do). I wanted to make this post to save people time if you are also a disabled student, or happen to have this model of printer for another reason.