Author Archives: admin

Qemu/KVM Command Line Notes

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The executable kvm is an alias for (symbolic link to) qemu-system-x86_64

KVM is the type 1 hypervisor which can be used by QEMU for speed

-accel kvm is the newer way of saying –enable-kvm

CPU host pass-through for speed

-cpu host

Select boot device (c for HDD, d for cd-rom)

-boot d

Attach IDE optical drive (only one allowed, more needs to me mapped with -drive)

-cdrom {iso file or device file}

SPICE (rdp-like protocol to control virtual machine through IP) recommends qxl video driver

-vga qxl

-spice port={default is 3001},password={cannot start with numbers or it’ll be treated as boolean as it’d be interpreted as numeric}

Base HDD/SSD drive: discard=unmap means TRIM for SSD, can add it as a virtio device for speed ONLY AFTER the guest virtio drivers are installed:

-drive file={VHD or drive image file},discard=unmap[,if=virtio]

Speedup by skipping precision clock catchup (HPET)

-no-hpet

Use base=localtime to correct for Linux and Window’s difference in interpreting host RTC’s timezone (Linux assumes that hardware time is UTC+0 while Windows assumed it’s your local time)

-rtc base=localtime,clock=host

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Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix notes

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Fix annoying bash colors

Folders (di) color ($LS_COLOR) are dark blue by default which is hard to read on a default dark background (also default): edit ~/.bashrc and add this to the last line to change folder colors to change it to bold (1) light blue (94)

LS_COLORS=$LS_COLORS:'di=1;94:' ; export LS_COLORS

The default prompt ($PS1) also contains the directory (\w), which is also in dark blue (34) but bold (1) by default. Look for the line right below the $color_prompt flag section and change the color ([\033[<STYLE>;<COLOR>m]) modified before \w from bold dark blue (01;34) to bold light blue (01;94)

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then 
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;94m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '

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Extract installer package with secret command line switches

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7-zip do not open the contents of every single self-extracting installer executable. Sometimes you’ll see garbage like this

Here’s a list of the ‘secret’ keys I know to get the core driver files out for slipstream

For a more generic way of capturing temporary files, redirect the temp folder to somewhere with a custom ACL permissions that do not allow deleting:

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Thunderbird Quirks

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Mail sorts from oldest to newest by default

This design choice escapes me and is highly annoying. Go go Preferences/Settings > Config Editor (the very bottom problem at the page)

It’s called Advanced Preferences tab. Look up mailnews.default_sort_order and change the value from 1 (ascending) to 2 (descending).

You can change the field to sort by mailnews.default_sort_type. By default it’s 18 (sort by date)

Thanks https://markohoven.com/2021/01/06/descending-sort-order-thunderbird/ for the clue.

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