xkeeper

welcome to my personal hell

dragon warrior iii for the game boy color describes me as "stubborn", and i'm tempted to agree with that assessment


co-owner tcrf.net. i run an old forum, jul.
i've been around the internet since '01.
i generally feel like the internet
peaked somewhere around '07.


private: @xkeeper-PLUS
18+: @xkeeper-TI


plural / some kind of digital therian thing.
still discovering myself.
all of this is new to me.


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@xkeeper
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Xkeeper.99

I still think it's cool that I have what is probably the stupidest setup possible: A _dual-booting, physical-AND-virtual install.

like, sure, you can "dual boot" or whatever, and then select windows or linux when you boot.

but i have it set up so that my computer boots with GRUB, which lets me pick Windows 10 or Ubuntu 20.04; but in Windows 10, I have VirtualBox set up with the actual disk partition, too. So I can literally boot my Linux install in Windows, in a VM, and it works more or less exactly the same.

There are two caveats: one, virtualbox must be started with admin privs, because this is raw disk access; and two, you must update the kernel and bootloader from the real system. (I have a second lightweight Ubuntu install in the VM only, for updating the VM's bootloader; it will autodetect the real install and such)

But outside of that it works flawlessly, and back when I used to use this machine for work regularly I would switch between them pretty frequently.


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in reply to @xkeeper's post:

it was surprisingly not too hard:

  • make a vm in vbox and install ubuntu on it
  • edit the vm using command line tools to attach the real linux partition to it
  • launch in admin mode
  • use a grub editor in the ubuntu vm to update grub + autodetect the partition attached to it, and then make that one the auto-loaded

a lot of stuff said "holy shit never do this" but as long as you follow the simple steps ("don't update the kernel or bootloader from the virtual side") it's gold

edit: you'll also have to install the vbox guest additions and such, but i've found that ubuntu 20.04 seems to handle those fine when not in virtual mode