Yeah, they could do a better job by having a big button directing people to buy it at the website, but if you go to the “Buy” option in the top bar you’ll find it among all of their other offerings.
€1100 with the current F39 release discount and €1000 with the extra €100 discount for Fedora contributors
That’s incredibly overpriced for the spec and what you’re getting. Ouch. Why can’t somebody make a decent laptop that’s actually remotely cost competitive with a bog standard Windows laptop that I can just randomly buy at my local store?
Umm, check Lenovo, they are our partners at Fedora as well and have decently priced Fedora-preinstalled hardware as well. The thing with smaller companies is that they have smaller reserves and less stock than the tech giants like DELL or Lenovo.
This is a laptop with a 2 generation old processor and no real GPU being sold for about the same price as a Lenovo laptop with a Ryzen 7 + 4060 GPU in it. I think Lenovo scammed you.
This isn’t a jar of honey it’s a mass produced electronic device that’s only made in a select few factories in the world with some custom branding on it. Lenovo has just given them some old stock which they’re trying to flip. Very different scenario to a mom and pop store entirely.
if you just need software to set up virtual machines you might look into Gnome Boxes or virt-manager which don’t require external kernel modules like Virtuap Box to work
anyway these issues typically happen on Ubuntu based distros (like Linux Mint) because your linux kernel is to new for the Virtual Box version (or the Virtual Box version is simply too old)
I’ve used VirtualBox for years and only just tried virt-manager. I wish I had tried years ago, so much simpler and it is in my distro’s default repository.
I tried virt-manager but it’s giving me an error message about not being able to connect to "libvirt qemu:///system" and it wont let me install a virtual machine. I’m assuming that I’m supposed to download “libvirtd”, but I can’t figure out how to install it. I think it wants me to build it from the source but there doesn’t seem to be a guide on how to do that.
It stated that they were already installed so I went through the process of re-installing them and rebooting the computer, which seems to have fixed the problem. I wont really be able to test it much right now because of how late it is for me but I was able to at least start the installation for Windows XP.
I’m currently installing virt-manager but I ran into a problem with Gnome Boxes where I’m trying to run a Windows XP virtual machine but I can’t figure out how to get files from my host to the guest. Apparently, I need some software to be running on the guest but the website that I need to download the software from doesn’t work in internet explorer and I obviously can’t just download it on the host and transfer it to the guest.
Yes this seems to be a Gnome Boxes Flatpak problem. I like that it works as a flatpak, but unsure if this can be fixed, I think its a known limitation.
Oh yes, the spice guest addition. This will be needed on every Spice VM
So I tried virt-manager but it’s giving me an error message about not being able to connect to "libvirt qemu:///system" and it wont let me install a virtual machine. I’m assuming that I’m supposed to download “libvirtd”, but I can’t figure out how to install it. I think it wants me to build it from the source but there doesn’t seem to be a guide on how to do that.
Are you using a package manager or downloading everything from virtualboxs website? When I installed virtual box earlier today it all worked fine so that’s why I ask.
I installed it through apt with just sudo apt install virtualbox-7.0. I also downloaded the deb file from their website but, at least when installed through apt, it just ignores it and uses the version from Mint’s repository anyways.
Edit: Because I just checked and you can’t install it directly like that anymore, I first tried installing VirtualBox a few months ago, with an older version of Linux Mint. When I tried installing it several hours ago, it was with the deb file but for some reason apt still selects a different version when it actually installs it.
I read that you installed a specific version months ago, but now installed it from a .deb file recently.
I’m asking why you don’t just sudo apt install virtualbox now?
I literally stated in my comment that you can’t install it like that anymore. The reason why is because you get an error saying “E: Package ‘virtualbox-7.0’ has no installation candidate”. This means that in Linux Mint, you have to install it via the deb file.
And I literally wrote in the comment above yours to install the version in the repo instead, with sudo apt install virtalbox. NOTsudo apt install virtualbox-7.0
6.1 is the newest version included in your OS. That’s just how Linux works.
Downloading newer versions from somewhere else is sometimes possible, but can lead to a lot of headaches, especially with packages that interact with the kernel.
If you notice you keep running into this issue and using the newest stuff is important to you, consider switching to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s the most beginner-friendly rolling release distro.
I already tried that yesterday and it didn’t work. It’s not that big of a problem though because both Gnome Boxes and virt-manager are working fine. So I wont need VirtualBox anymore.
Gnome's Boxes is pretty easy to use and of course uses qemu + KVM. This would be a type 1 hypervisor vs. Virtualbox's type 2. It is point and click like Virtualbox. You don't need to use Gnome's DE to use Boxes.
I have seen people post about your specific error for years when using the virtualbox website's repository instead of their own distro's repository (if it exists).
I just tried Gnome Boxes and it seems to work mostly fine but the only problem I’m having is that I’m trying to run a Windows XP virtual machine but I can’t figure out how to get files from my host to the guest. Apparently, I need some software to be running on the guest but the website that I need to download the software from doesn’t work in internet explorer and I obviously can’t just download it on the host and transfer it to the guest.
In Boxes, power down your XP VM, click Settings -> Sharing Panel -> Enable Sharing toggle. Click File Sharing and enable File Sharing. Power on the VM.
At that point you should be able to drag and drop from your host direct into your VM for a file transfer.
You can also click the vertical dots menu in the Guest's console "screen" and click Send File... menu option.
In the same menu you can click Devices & Shares -> Realtek USB or whatever -> Local Folder -> Select from the dropdown for the Host's folder that you'd like to share -> Save -> Make sure Toggle on the right is on.
Then your folder, I believe in XP, will show up as a removable drive like a USB drive would.
Ok so I’ve already determined a solution for Boxes but I should mention that none what you said works for me. I’m not sure if I have a different version of Boxes than you (even though the only version that seems to exist is the one on flathub) but there is no sharing panel in settings. The only three options in settings is keyboard shortcuts, help and about boxes. When I’m running a VM, the option for “send file” is grayed out and can’t be selected.
For “devices & shares” that is, at least for me, located in the preferences for each VM. I can’t use USB devices because it’s not supported in the flatpak version and if I try to use the shared folders option, the folder I specified doesn’t show up in the VM. From what I can tell this might be an issue specific to some guests, like Windows XP, because Boxes links to a specific program that the guest needs to be running but when I try to run it in Windows XP, I get an error message stating that Windows XP isn’t a supported guest.
The only solution that seems to work for me, is taking the files I want to use in the VM and compress them into an iso file (if they’re not already) and mount it to the VM. It might be tedious but it’s the only thing that seems to be working for me.
I probably wouldn’t describe it as similar, but virt-manager is fairly simple but powerful at the same time (like it will let you expose more advanced KVM/QEMU features like PCIe passthrough and similar).
But like the other guy said, gnome boxes is very straight forward and probably more similar in it’s simplicity.
They both use QEMU + KVM, so you can have both virt-manager and boxes installed at once, and I believe virt-manager (probably boxes too) easily let you use existing VirtualBox .vdi files, if you’ve got an existing VM you want to run. Also like I said before, KVM is already mainlined into the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to install sketchy kernel modules and stuff.
I’ve only used VirtualBox once though, so I can’t really compare them.
I tried both virt-manager and Gnome Boxes but I’m having issues with both of them.
Gnome Boxes works mostly fine but I can’t seem to get files from the host to the guest. It says that the guest is supposed to have some special software but I’m trying to use Windows XP and I can’t seem to figure out how to get the required software because the website doesn’t work in internet explorer and I obviously can’t just download it from the host and transfer it over.
For virt-manager, it’s giving me an error message about not being able to connect to "libvirt qemu:///system" and it wont let me install a virtual machine. I’m assuming that I’m supposed to download “libvirtd”, but I can’t figure out how to install it. I think it wants me to build it from the source but there doesn’t seem to be a guide on how to do that.
It says that the guest is supposed to have some special software
That sounds like virtio-win. I usually use the iso and mount it from virt-manager, but if the internet is working then I guess you can download the exe.
I’m assuming that I’m supposed to download “libvirtd”
Just searched it up, something like this should work: sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system bridge-utils virtinst libvirt-daemon
Sorry I don’t have too much experience with gnome boxes either, I mostly use virt-manager.
So I tried virt-manager but it’s giving me an error message about not being able to connect to "libvirt qemu:///system" and it wont let me install a virtual machine. I’m assuming that I’m supposed to download “libvirtd”, but I can’t figure out how to install it. I think it wants me to build it from the source but there doesn’t seem to be a guide on how to do that.
How do those compare to NixOS and blendOS in your opinion in terms of usability, flexibility and stability, considering an (at least mostly) tech-literate audience?
Given I’m still on Manjaro, would you recommend I consider NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, or blendOS?
It’s telling me that they are already installed: j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) [sudo] password for j: Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree… Done Reading state information… Done linux-headers-5.15.0-88-generic is already the newest version (5.15.0-88.98). linux-headers-5.15.0-88-generic set to manually installed. The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: brave-keyring libu2f-udev linux-headers-5.15.0-76 linux-headers-5.15.0-76-generic linux-headers-5.15.0-78 linux-headers-5.15.0-78-generic linux-headers-5.15.0-79 linux-headers-5.15.0-79-generic linux-headers-5.15.0-82 linux-headers-5.15.0-82-generic linux-headers-5.15.0-83 linux-headers-5.15.0-83-generic linux-headers-5.15.0-84 linux-headers-5.15.0-84-generic linux-headers-5.15.0-86 linux-headers-5.15.0-86-generic linux-image-5.15.0-76-generic linux-image-5.15.0-78-generic linux-image-5.15.0-79-generic linux-image-5.15.0-82-generic linux-image-5.15.0-83-generic linux-image-5.15.0-84-generic linux-image-5.15.0-86-generic linux-modules-5.15.0-76-generic linux-modules-5.15.0-78-generic linux-modules-5.15.0-79-generic linux-modules-5.15.0-82-generic linux-modules-5.15.0-83-generic linux-modules-5.15.0-84-generic linux-modules-5.15.0-86-generic linux-modules-extra-5.15.0-76-generic linux-modules-extra-5.15.0-78-generic linux-modules-extra-5.15.0-79-generic linux-modules-extra-5.15.0-82-generic linux-modules-extra-5.15.0-83-generic linux-modules-extra-5.15.0-84-generic linux-modules-extra-5.15.0-86-generic Use ‘sudo apt autoremove’ to remove them. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Is there something specific from that link that I’m supposed to use because I tired the top solution and it just gave me a bunch of error messages:
<span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` dkms virtualbox-dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[sudo] password for j:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading package lists... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Building dependency tree... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading state information... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dkms is already the newest version (2.8.7-2ubuntu2.1mint1).
</span><span style="color:#323232;">build-essential is already the newest version (12.9ubuntu3).
</span><span style="color:#323232;">linux-headers-5.15.0-88-generic is already the newest version (5.15.0-88.98).
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libqt5help5 libqt5sql5 libqt5sql5-sqlite libqt5xml5 libsdl-ttf2.0-0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following additional packages will be installed:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libgsoap-2.8.117 liblzf1 libvncserver1 virtualbox virtualbox-qt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Suggested packages:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> vde2 virtualbox-guest-additions-iso
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following packages will be REMOVED:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> virtualbox-7.0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following NEW packages will be installed:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libgsoap-2.8.117 liblzf1 libvncserver1 virtualbox virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-qt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Need to get 0 B/46.5 MB of archives.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">After this operation, 43.0 MB disk space will be freed.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
</span><span style="color:#323232;">debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(Reading database ... 642834 files and directories currently installed.)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Removing virtualbox-7.0 (7.0.12-159484~Ubuntu~jammy) ...
</span><span style="color:#323232;">debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dpkg: error processing package virtualbox-7.0 (--remove):
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> installed virtualbox-7.0 package pre-removal script subprocess returned error exit status 1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dpkg: too many errors, stopping
</span><span style="color:#323232;">vboxdrv.sh: failed: modprobe vboxdrv failed. Please use 'dmesg' to find out why.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">There were problems setting up VirtualBox. To re-start the set-up process, run
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> /sbin/vboxconfig
</span><span style="color:#323232;">as root. If your system is using EFI Secure Boot you may need to sign the
</span><span style="color:#323232;">kernel modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt, vboxnetadp, vboxpci) before you can load
</span><span style="color:#323232;">them. Please see your Linux system's documentation for more information.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Errors were encountered while processing:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> virtualbox-7.0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv
</span><span style="color:#323232;">modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'vboxdrv': Operation not permitted
</span>
You didn’t clarify you were running the Oracle release of Virtualbox 7.0. I am running Virtualbox 7.0 on Linux Mint 21.2 without issue, but my computer is too old for EFI. Those instructions are for the community release, which has the components of virtualbox split into separate packages.
I don’t have any good answers for you, but I would recommend you update your post to include the fact that you’re running Oracle’s packages, and the version of Linux Mint you’re using.
When you say other packages, what are you referring to? If you are referring to downloading the package directly from their website verses just installing it through apt using Mint’s repository, I have done both and I have the same issue with both of them.
If you must and you have the hardware maybe run Windows in a VM just for those applications. You can even suspend the vm state to resume from where you were.
While I’ve looked into Fedora Silverblue, that distro is limited to only install Flatpaks, which is fine for “apps”, but seems to be more of a problem with managing system- and CLI tools.
No. Your understanding to Fedora Silverblue is wrong. I can just run rpm-ostree install package.name in Silverblue, like other Fedora spins. The small disadvantage is that I need to reboot to apply this update. (re-construct)
but doesn’t that result in new A/B snapshots, or something like that?
Well, you can call it snapshots, but there is no need to think about it. In most cases, the system points to the newest snapshot (deployment 0). If a rollback is needed, I can pin to the older deployments. When a major change is to be applied (Like bump Fedora version), I’d manually mark the current deployment as dont-auto-delete.
Sure, but I’d like to have a more seamless experience, i.e. not having to open/start any “containers” or something like that.
I never used toolbox in my Fedora Silverblue system. I feel that I can’t tell the difference between using Silverblue and the default Fedora spin
It depends on if the changes needs it or not. You can set a reboot flag on a given task and at the end the system will reboot, but if no reboot is needed then it will just make the change live.
I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively. You can do that through containers, but you can do that with containers on any distro. Where it shines is declaring the complete system configuration (including installed programs and their configuration) in its config file (on file-based configuration, I wouldn’t really consider blendos a viable competitor).
And you can create package configs, but you can also do that for nearly every distro. So, yeah, that confuses me too… I’m not sure what OP was trying to say there.
To clarify, I was referring specifically to its ability to specify the full system configuration in its config file - not overall. But I haven’t used blendos, and my impression is mostly from a quick look at their documentation. They have a snippet with sample configuration. There, they have a “Modules” section, but I couldn’t find what modules are available, what options they have, how to configure them if we want to do something more complex than the available options.
Then containers are clearer: they have a list of installed apps, and then commands to bring them to the desired state (somewhat similar to a dockerfile). But even then, i imagine that if you have a more complex configuration, that’s going to get clunkier.
Do you think the use of OCI containers/images is a mistake/bad choice from blendOS?
No. It’s probably the best way to run packages from Arch, Debian. Ubuntu, Fedora, and others, all on the same system.
How is NixOS different?
NixOS simply doesn’t tackle that problem, so it doesn’t come with containers out of the box. If you want to run packages from other distros on NixOS, you’d probably need to manually configure the containers.
I feel like you’re under the impression that the three distros, NixSO, blendos, and Vanilla OS, have similar goals. I don’t know about Vanilla OS, but the main similarity between the other two is that they’re both non-standard in some way.
But they’re actually solving completely different problems: BlendOS wants to be a blend of different OSes, NixOS wants to have a reproducible, declarative configuration (declarative here means, you don’t list a bunch of steps to reach your system state, but instead declare what that state is).
It’s the probably the best distro for dev work imo. Nix in general is really nice for development. Games work fine — you can just install steam or putrid or whatever, and you can run normal binaries with steam-run.
The single killer feature that convinced me to move to NixOS is the ability to very easily keep separate development environments separate. For instance, if you’re working on multiple dev projects that have different minimum requirements, and you want to ensure that (for instance) you don’t accidentally use features from after boost 1.61 for project A, because that’s the stated requirement, but you need features from boost 1.75 in project B.
In a normal distribution, in order to set up an environment that has the proper version for project A you’d need to set up a chroot, a virtual machine, a complicated set of environment variables in a bespoke script with custom installation paths that you need to set up manually and remember to source, or just install a newer version of boost and rely on continuous integration to catch it if you screw up.
In NixOS, you can set up different shells which all reference the exact correct version of the libraries required for every project, you can have them installed simultaneously and without conflicts, and there’s even a shell hooking program that will automatically load and unload this configuration when you change directories into and out of the project folder. It makes managing many different projects much easier. It’s like a better version of venv, but for everything.
Well, for playing games I use the flatpak version of steam and it works OK.
For dev work, it’s great overall. Especially its ability to create separate reproducible environments with whatever dependencies you need for every project. However, there are some tools (rare, but they exist) that don’t work well with it, and if your dev work happens to need them, it can becomes a problem.
For day to day (i.e. web browsing), it works the same as anything, with one disadvantage: there is a disadvantage here: it downloads a lot more than other distros on update, and uses more disk space. The biggest difference between NixOS, and say Arch, is not how it behaves once it’s up and running, but in how you configure it. Specifically, you have to invest a lot of time to learn how, and set up your system initially. But then reinstalls, and (some of) the maintenance, become easier.
The way nix deals with packages is very different from most distros. If you install a newer version of a package, the older version just gets hidden, not removed. This makes it very easy to rollback or recover from errors, but it does mean you tend to use more space.
In regular FHS distros, an upgrade to libxyz can be done without an update to its dependants a, b and c. The libxyz.so is updated in-place and newly run processes of a, b and c will use the new shared object code.
In Nix’ model, changing a dependency in any way changes all of its dependants too. The package a that depends on libxyz 1.0.0 is treated as entirely different from the otherwise same package a that depends on libxyz 1.0.1 or libxyz 1.0.0 with a patch applied/new dependency/patch applied to the compiler/anything.
Nix encodes everything that could in any way influence a package’s content into that package’s “version”. That’s the hash in every Nix store path (i.e. /nix/store/5jlfqjgr34crcljr8r93kwg2rk5psj9a-bash-interactive-5.2-p15/bin/bash). The version number in the end is just there to inform humans of a path’s contents; as far as Nix is concerned, it’s just an arbitrary name string.
Therefore, any update to “core” dependencies requires a rebuild of all dependants. For very central core packages such as glibc, that means almost all packages in existence. Because those packages are “different” from the packages on your system without the update, you must download them all again and, because they have different hashes, they will be in separate paths in your Nix store.
This is what allows Nix to have parallel “installation” of any version of any package and roll back your entire config to a previous state because your entire system is treated as a “package” with the same semantics as described above.
Unless you have harsh data caps, extremely slow connections or are extremely tight on disk space, this isn’t much of a concern though.
Additionally, you can always “garbage collect” old paths that are no longer referenced and Nix can deduplicate whole files that are 1:1 the same across the whole Nix store.
I would disagree. I feel like nixpkgs has pretty much everything, more so than any other distro in my experience. The differences in how NixOS work can make it a little weird to run something off the cuff, but steam-run has your back in those situations.
I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively.
I don’t quite agree with this. In NixOS you can write custom expressions that fetch software from any source, and stitch them into your configuration as first-class packages. So you do get access to all Linux-capable software natively, but not necessarily easily. (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
I use this process to bring nightly releases of neovim and nushell into my reproducible config. Ok, I do use flakes that other people published for building those projects, which is a bit like installing from a community PPA. But when I wanted to install Niri, a very new window manager I wrote the package and NixOS module expressions all by myself!
Another NixOS user (and minor package maintainer, if it matters) here. Essentially, NixOS is actually rather simple to write a configuration file for a particular program once you get the knack for the nix language and learn how to workaround the sandboxing. I would actually consider it substantially less involved as compared to (for instance) creating your own Debian package.
However, getting to this point will take a bit of effort, and this step is more or less obligatory to use software on NixOS, whereas it generally isn’t (but still is a good idea) on other distributions.
(There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
“Learning curve” is an understatement. Nix is one of the most poorly documented projects I’ve seen, next to openstack. Coming into it with no background in functional programming didn’t help.
But I’ve tried to package other stuff, like quarto, and that was a nightmare. Nixpkgs didn’t have an updated pandoc and I spent an eternity asking around for help, to try to package it. An updated version just got pushed to unstable a few days ago. The same matrix channels I joined to ask for help have been discussing this since then. Props on them for getting it working, but anyone who says that you can easily package anything, is capping. You need to have an understanding of the nix language, nix packaging (both of which are poorly documented), and a rudimentary packaging ecosystem of what you are trying to package.
Don’t even get me started on flakes vs nonflakes.
I still use nix-shell for all my development environments, because it’s the best way for reproducible environments I can share I’ve found.
Look again at Fedora Silverblue /any other desktop variant. VanillaOSses apx is just a wrapper around distrobox, which is preinstalled on ublue even.
Apx installs apps on containers just as it is possible on Fedora Atomic (the general name for all immutable desktops). You can also layer and remove apps to or from the base OS which is sometimes needed or nice for speed.
On Fedora Atomic you have
flatpak
podman containers (toolbx, distrobox: like apx on VanillaOS but without the great tooling and GUI management, yet)
rootful containers for stuff interacting with systemd, needing USB access etc.
layering or removing packages / changing the OS to something like ublue to let other people do the work, especially for NVIDIA drivers
linux
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.