Tag: windows

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Windows 8.1 update 4/8/14

I picked up the 4/8/14 Windows 8.1 update today and was pleased that the Metro apps can now appear in the ‘classic’ desktop taskbar. It still seems odd to me that Windows 8 has two distinctly different personalities – the touchscreen friendly Metro apps from the new Start screen, and the classic desktop with regular looking Windows apps. It just seems confused to me – which is it? A post-PC touchscreen OS or a classic Windows desktop? Well, now at least the two are somewhat more combined.

Rather more odd however is that this cumulative update is required if you want to continue to receive Windows Updates. Pretty sure some internal IT departments are going to be pretty annoyed with this approach – “You want updates in the future? Install every update up to this date then we’ll give you new updates”. Uhuh.

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Cygwin, git and ssh: ‘cannot spawn c:cygwinbinssh’

Using Cygwin and git on windows, I ran into an issue where git was working fine in a cygwin shell, but I was trying to setup a Jenkins build accessing a git repo, and git from Windows was giving errors like this:

$ git push myremote master
error: cannot spawn c:cygwinbinssh: No such file or directory
fatal: unable to fork

Running shell commands on Windows in Cygwin this was somewhat misleading, as I wasn’t expecting it to be looking for ‘ssh.exe’.

Turns out my GIT_SSH env var was causing the issue, had to replace this:

GIT_SSH=c:cygwinbinssh

with

GIT_SSH=c:cygwinbinssh.exe

and then all was good.

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Booting your Windows Bootcamp partition in VirtualBox

I have XP in my Bootcamp partition which I occasionally boot to run apps that I don’t have on Mac OS X, usually it’s for a Windows game. It annoys me to switch between Mac OS X and booting Windows from Bootcamp, as it takes a while to switch back and forth. The only reason I’ve ever considered buying Fusion or Parallels is to be able to boot from the Bootcamp partition and avoid having two Windows installs – one in Bootcamp and one on a virtual disk. Sometimes it’s fine to boot in a virtual machine, but othertimes you really want to boot natively to make full use of the graphics card and DirectX etc. Turns out you can set up VirtualBox to easily boot from a Bootcamp partition, and avoid having two installs.

I followed the instructions here, and after a bit of fiddling with with VirtualBox settings for my new VM, it booted fine. The instructions are for booting Windows 7 from Bootcamp in VirtualBox, but it works the same for XP too.

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