antipaucity

In preparation for an upcoming post on remastering Knoppix, I have made a VirtualBox virtual appliance based on the Knoppix v7.6.1 DVD all set for remastering.

/dev/sda holds the raw files.

/dev/sdb1 is a swap partition.

To use the appliance, download the Knoppix 7.6.1 DVD. You’ll need a boot environment for remastering, and Knoppix has the tools you need to remaster it.

Make sure you mount /dev/sda somewhere memorable. And that you run a swapon /dev/sdb1 before you start.

Have fun.

Download the .ova appliance from me here.

I have been a fan of Haiku for years – and BeOS since way back in the 90s. I run a Haiku mirror, and try to pay attention to the project’s updates.

Today I am making available a Haiku-OS r1 alpha 4.1 virtual appliance!

Download it from me here (created in VirtualBox, but in .ova format, so should work “anywhere”). Download links for current editions (for new releases of Haiku-OS) will be maintained on my Projects page.

Specs:

• 1G RAM (could’ve easily gotten away with 512M or even 256M, but given everyone should have 1G free (especially if running VirtualBox), went with this size)
• 20G storage (dynamically allocated, of course), formatted BFS (because it’s better than NTFS – and doesn’t “actually” format the disk (it does, but only kinda – it’s akin to lazy zeroing in VMware)) in VMDK format (if you care)
• 2 CPUs
• 32M video memory
• network: NAT’d

Appliance [download] size :: ~250M.

Couple quick notes:

• SAP is not designed for automated / programmatic access – their “BAPI”, or binary application programming interface, requires additional licensing beyond just the product to use
  • I made the naive assumption that a “BAPI” was like a WSDL – and it is, but it’s proprietary, not open (and it’s binary, not plaintext XML)
• HP Operations Orchestration requires an additional, ie not out-of-the-box, content pack and wizard to import SAP BAPIs to make operations

That said, the power of OO can be brought to bear with SAP and imported BAPIs – with the following gotchas:

• You can only have one BAPI call in a given flow
• If you want to call more than one BAPI for a given task, you need to have them split into their own subflows, and call the subflows

Hopefully you won’t need to know this. But if you do, I’m happy to save you some of the headaches I have experienced interoperating with SAP & OO.

If you install VirtualBox, like I did last week, [at least] under Windows 10, and you have not gone into the BIOS ahead of time to enable virtualization, you will be limited to 32-bit guest OSes.

Enable virtualization, and the 64-bit options become available.

Not sure why you have to enable the hardware virtualization extensions to get 64-bit guest support (nor why it isn’t enabled by default on laptops like the Lenovo T450s which are aimed at business users), but you do.

Thankfully, you can enable virtualization after the install, and you don’t need to reinstall (which wouldn’t be a huge deal, but certainly an annoyance).

In similar fashion to what I wrote about for OS X last year, and spurred by this article from Microsoft, here is my brief guide for doing the same on Windows 10.

Click your Notifications button near the clock.

Now click All Settings

And you’ll see this

Click Personalization, then Lock Screen. Select “Slideshow” from the dropdown.

There you go.

I went through a Burger King drive-thru recently on my way to a customer office to get a drink. It being relatively early in the day, I thought getting a coffee would be a Good Ideaâ„¢.

It was not.

It was bad. Really bad.

It was coffee-colored and -scented hot water.

I cannot recall the last time I had something so mislabeled sold to me.

^{_{(*Though most people would call me an XXXL blogger.)}}

Following in the steps of Dave Winer, I am now plogging (sorta) on Medium.

And, like Mr Winer, I’m doing it via IFTTT (though not via RSS, I’m doing it via the WordPress channel).

If you’d like to do the same, use this IFTTT recipe.