I set Shared Clipboard to Bidirectional.

And I set Drag'n'Drop to "Host to Guest", since nothing else works, except disabling drag and drop.

But, if I ever do want to use 2 monitors - in the Video settings, I can set "Monitor Count" to 2. (However, multiple monitors is another feature that doesn't start working until you install VirtualBox Guest Additions inside the guest system.) And while running my guest system, I can disable mouse integration via the Machine menu, and avoid seamless mode.

And here's the command I used to make my virtual right monitor act like it's below my virtual left monitor:

And I put a check in the box next to "Enable 3D Acceleration".

(I did that because the only part of my Puppy Linux Setup Kit which requires internet access is the downloader scripts, and I'm not working on those yet.)

I created 8 virtual optical disc drives - probably more than I'll need.

(Actually, I used an ISO I slightly modified, but I haven't released that, one reason being because I haven't used it enough yet to know if my modifications caused any serious glitches or not.)

You can get an official Lighthouse 64 Puppy Linux 6.02 Beta 2 ISO from:

(This is necessary because the VirtualBox Guest Additions installer won't work unless the DevX SFS file is mounted inside the guest system. And my guest system can't download the DevX from the internet because I removed my guest system's internet access.)

The official DevX SFS file for Lighthouse 64 Puppy Linux 6.02 Beta 2 can be downloaded from this page:

To put the DevX file into my own custom ISO file, I put the DevX file in a folder named "DevX", and ran this command line, with my console's working directory set to the folder containing the "DevX" folder:

The -V option sets the disc's name (which will be visible on the desktop of the virtual Puppy) to "DevX".

The -o option specifies the filepath where the ISO file will be output to.

The "DevX" text at the end of the command line refers to the "DevX" folder which I wanted mkisofs to put into an ISO file.

Shared folders can't be mounted and accessed until you install VirtualBox Guest Additions inside the virtual system.

In the "Folder Name" field for each shared folder, I put descriptive names like "ReadOnly-LegacySetupKit" and "ReadOnly-RenovSetupKit".

I read here that "Symbolic link creation from within a guest has been disabled in VirtualBox 4.1.8 for security reasons."

However, anytime I've run a Puppy Linux guest system, symlinks located in shared folders and pointing to files in the host system usually appear to be broken. Or, if the guest system actually contains a file or folder at the symlink's destination path, the guest system interprets the symlink to be referring to that guest system file or folder, and it can't access the host system's file or folder through that symlink.

So, I'm not sure there's a security issue here with Puppy Linux guests, though I easily could be wrong.

Things are very different with a Puppy Linux host and a Windows XP guest. With VirtualBox 4.1.8, a Lucid Puppy Linux 5.2.8 version 004 host and a Windows XP guest, any symlinks located in a shared folder and pointing to files or folders in the host system make those files and folders totally accessible to the Windows XP guest! Which was actually useful to me back in the days when my primary use for VirtualBox was to use Astroblahhh Desktop in a Windows XP guest.

But, if my Windows XP guest had been capable of creating its own symlinks in shared folders, I'm guessing it probably would have been able to have access to probably any file at all in my host Puppy Linux system, which could have been quite bad, if my Windows XP guest was infected with malware.

Anyway, since I usually don't let my Puppy Linux guests have internet access, and I sometimes need to be able to create symlinks in shared folders, and symlinks in shared folders maybe aren't as dangerous with a Puppy Linux guest as they definitely are with a Windows XP guest, I was willing to take the risk that there might actually be major security problems with enabling my Puppy Linux guest to create symlinks in shared folders.

I learned how to do it from this page's comment #14.

I wasn't able to enable symlink creation in every shared folder all at once. Instead, I have to enable symlink creation for each individual shared folder I want my guest system to be able to create symlinks in.

Which wasn't that much of a nuisance, since I only have 2 writable shared folders.

So, in my host system's console, I ran these two command lines.

Please only use these commands at your own risk, because maybe there are worse security problems than I think.

Actually, my shared folders aren't named "Physical_Disk" and "RAM_Disk", but I renamed them here for clarity's sake.

To use the above command lines, you'll need to change those names to whatever your shared folders' names are - whatever label you put in the "Folder Name" section of their settings.

Also, you'll need to change "APSK" (the name of my virtual machine) to the name of your virtual machine.

You don't need to restart the entire VirtualBox program for the new settings to take effect, but if your virtual machine is running, you'll have to turn it off and on again. The new settings should start working right away, even if you restore a system snapshot instead of rebooting without a snapshot.

1. First, you must start up the virtual machine and go through the Puppy Linux startup process.

2. After Puppy Linux's desktop appears - click the "DevX" CD drive icon near the bottom of the desktop to view the contents of the DevX ISO.

3. Inside that folder, right-click on "devx-l64.sfs" and choose "sfs-load" from the menu. In the "SFS-Load" dialog box that appears, click the "SFS-Load" button.

4. In the "sfs-load" dialog box that appears after that, select "NOCOPY" from the dropdown box, then click OK.

5. When it asks you if you want to add a new mount point for the SFS file, click OK. Eventually, a dialog box will appear and tell you the SFS file is successfully loaded.

   
   

6. Click the "VBOXADDITIO" CD drive icon near the bottom of the desktop to view the contents of the VirtualBox Guest Additions ISO.

7. While inside the folder that appears (with /media/VBOXADDITIONS_4.3.22_98236 in the title), press the ~ key on your keyboard. (This will open a console with its working directory set to this folder.)

   
   

8. To run the VirtualBox Guest Additions installer - type this command line in the console window you just opened in the previous step:

   ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

   
   

9. Gradually, the installer will print out the below details about what it's doing.
   tty: ignoring all arguments /dev/pts/0 Verifying archive integrity... All good. Uncompressing VirtualBox 4.3.22 Guest Additions for Linux............ VirtualBox Guest Additions installer Copying additional installer modules ... add_symlink: link file /usr/lib/VBoxGuestAdditions already exists Installing additional modules ... Removing existing VirtualBox non-DKMS kernel modules ...done. Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules Building the main Guest Additions module ...done. Building the shared folder support module ...done. Building the OpenGL support module ...done. Doing non-kernel setup of the Guest Additions ...done. Starting the VirtualBox Guest Additions ...done. Installing the Window System drivers Installing X.Org Server 1.12 modules ...done. Setting up the Window System to use the Guest Additions ...done. You may need to restart the hal service and the Window System (or just restart the guest system) to enable the Guest Additions. Installing graphics libraries and desktop services components ...fail! (See the log file /var/log/vboxadd-install-x11.log for more information.)

   I don't know why this happens: "Installing graphics libraries and desktop services components ...fail!"

   But, it seems to work fine for me anyway.

   
   

10. To temporarily enable various VirtualBox Guest Additions features, you can run these command lines:
    VBoxClient --clipboard VBoxClient --draganddrop VBoxClient --seamless

    Those features will go away the next time you restart the X server.

    If you want to keep those features enabled, you can add the above command lines to the file /root/.xinitrc, so they'll get run automatically every time the X server is restarted.

    (Here's the forum thread where I learned about the above command lines and the idea of adding them to .xinitrc.)

    
    

    • The --clipboard option makes it so you can copy and paste between the guest and host.

      To choose how you want the shared clipboard to behave (bidirectional, guest to host, host to guest, or disabled), go to VirtualBox's Devices menu, then its Shared Clipboard submenu.

      
      

    • The --draganddrop option gives you an easy way to share files between your host and guest. (Except on my computer, it only works when drag/dropping files from my host to the guest. So, to get files out of the guest system, I have to put them in a shared folder.)

      To choose how you want the drag and drop feature to behave (bidirectional, guest to host, host to guest, or disabled), go to VirtualBox's Devices menu, then its Drag'n'Drop submenu.

      
      

    • Seamless mode makes it look like windows from your host and guest are sharing the same desktop, even though they're really not.

      Sometimes you have to fiddle with the guest windows and/or switch out of Seamless mode and get back into it to make everything display properly.

To my surprise, it is possible to add new shared folders while the virtual machine is running - either permanent folders (which you can make by putting a check in the box next to "Make Permanent") which will go in the "Machine Folders" list permanently, or "Transient Folders".

Here's a command line I used to make an empty folder. (But you can create the empty folder any way you want, even using a graphical file manager.)

You can find out the "Folder Name" by going to the "Shared Folders" section of the virtual machine's settings, which you can view and edit even while the virtual machine is running.

The name you put after "vboxsf" should be your shared folder's "Folder Name", and the folderpath after that should be the folderpath (located inside your guest system) which you want to use as a mountpoint for that shared folder.

But, when you go to the folder you specified, you'll hopefully see the external files you were expecting to see.

You can open that folder from a console with command line like this:

VirtualBox's Snapshot feature makes it possible for me to easily test my Puppy Linux Setup Kit repeatedly on a fresh, mostly pristine, almost default system, without having to repeatedly reboot a real computer and/or go through the somewhat slow Puppy Linux startup process.

Instead, I can just shut down my virtual system and restore a snapshot in about 10 seconds. (I assume the fact that I keep snapshots in my RAM disk makes them save and load faster.)

After about 15 seconds, that resulted in a large snapshot file around 1 GB.

Then I relaunch my virtual machine, and after about 10 seconds, my snapshot is restored. (I assume the fact that I keep snapshots in my RAM disk makes them save and load faster.)

So far, I've actually spent more time on this blog post than actually working on my Puppy Linux Setup Kit with the help of VirtualBox.

But, that will probably soon change, and I think this new way of doing things will hopefully enable me to make a lot more progress much faster, assuming my health continues to improve.

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Legacy code woes

Saturday, July 1st, 2017 23:42:28 GMT

I've been feeling so overwhelmed lately by my Puppy Linux Setup Kit, my messy neglected websites, and Astroblahhh Desktop. Overwhelmed and stuck.

Actually, I've felt that way for years, which is probably part of why I've procrastinated so much about continuing to work on these projects at all.

But, recently, reading some articles about working on legacy code made me feel better and less worried that maybe I'm just not really cut out to be a programmer.

I hadn't realized that even much better, wiser, more experienced programmers than me can have immense trouble with this kind of project if they make the kinds of mistakes I've been making, such as trying to change too many things at once, not doing test-driven development (TDD), and overly optimistically attempting "big-bang rewrites".

Here are a couple of those articles:

Those articles and their advice look very wise to me, not that I would know. But I'm guessing that doing even just some of what is suggested might go far better for me than doing what I've been doing.

Even though (as far as I know) I'm the only person who ever worked on my Puppy Linux Setup Kit, Astroblahhh Desktop, and other languishing projects of mine, these projects have all been through the entire lifecycle mentioned in that first article, and have long been stuck in the last phase.

In many ways, I unintentionally designed things naively and poorly at the outset. I didn't document things well enough, and I took such long breaks from working on my own code that by the time I returned to it, I had forgotten a ton of details.

And for many years, I didn't even know what test-driven development (TDD) was. I finally tried it in 2015 or 2016 and liked it, but, quite unwisely, I still usually haven't gone to the trouble lately, and I probably ought to learn more about it so I can be more sure I'm doing it right.

I'm quite frustrated that I haven't gotten much more done by now, but, I probably shouldn't be too hard on myself. If I were really a hopelessly bad programmer:

• I never would have gotten anywhere making my modified version of the wonderful concept mapping software VUE: Visual Understanding Environment.

  And mostly, it was actually surprisingly much easier than I expected, by the time I finally got around to really trying to do it instead of just daydreaming about it.

  
  

• I never would have been able to get comfortable with the renowned (and renownedly difficult) GNU Emacs, and wouldn't have been able to figure out how to modify the incredibly useful multifiles.el add-on to do most of exactly what I wanted.

• Perhaps I would have fled back to Windows many years ago because I wouldn't have been able to figure out how to make GNU/Linux comfortable enough for me to stick with it.

• I never would have been able to figure out how to do anything useful with XSLT, such as this, and my Salty XML Transformer.

• My other projects never would have worked as well as they still do, despite all their flaws.

  
  

• And I wouldn't be able to "eat my own dogfood" continually, and mostly enjoy it. :-D

  Every day, or probably almost every hour I use a computer at all, I rely on something or other I built, like Navig, Ramize-Physave, termwin, or something I modified, like my modified version of VUE: Visual Understanding Environment.

  And even though my Puppy Linux Setup Kit has a ton of room for improvement and additional convenience, at least it still is much faster and more convenient than manually trying to do everything my setup kit already does automatically.

So, I'm definitely not even close to totally giving up on programming forever (though I feel very intimidated by the idea of trying to make a serious career out of it). But I think I need to be a lot more cautious and less naively optimistic than I was in the past.

The idea of releasing more of my work more frequently definitely appeals to me a lot. I've felt so guilty about not creating and/or releasing way more useful (or otherwise beneficial) stuff into the world already. And many people think sharing in-progress work publicly and frequently can result in much better software.

Preparing things for publication definitely encourages me to do a better job than I tend to do with things I don't expect to release anytime soon (if ever). Not that I don't still make numerous dumb mistakes either way, but I think maybe I make fewer dumb mistakes when I create something with publication in mind.

I sure wish I could do a perfect job on everything all the time, but, I've learned that I better not insist too stubbornly on perfection or I'll never get anything done.

Fortunately, already, without even knowing it (at first), I seem to have been moving away from the "cathedral" model of free/libre software development, "in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers", toward the "bazaar" model, "in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public".

That happened because I finally learned more about how to use Git and GitHub, so I've been sharing my work more frequently by releasing it on GitHub. Currently, that's much easier than uploading files to my own websites.

So, currently, this is the place to look for my absolute newest updates to whatever software projects:

Not much of what I've been adding lately has seemed notable enough (or easy to install or interesting or useful enough) for me to announce in new blog posts, so, I mostly haven't mentioned them here.

In retrospect, I maybe shouldn't have even announced Salty XML Transformer, because it's such a chore even for me to install, because I haven't made even my own not-yet-released Puppy Linux Setup Kit fully up to date yet.

By the way, I recently found out that ever since sometime in July 2016, the latest released version of the Puppy Linux Setup Kit (v1.1) was far less functional than I thought, because unfortunately, some of the files the old setup kit optionally tries to download are no longer available. Many went missing simply because I neglected to log into my Dropbox account for over a year, so my Dropbox account was automatically deleted in July 2016. Sorry for any inconvenience!

I probably shouldn't encourage people to use the old legacy versions of my setup kit. Certainly not yet. At some point I'm going to try to release many of my old-style setup kit scripts that I made since the last release in Feb. 2015 - but even I'm trying to get away from being stuck using any old-style version anymore, even my current best not-yet-released version.

I sure wish I could somehow gradually create a smooth transition from the old-style setup kit to the new-style setup kit I'm still trying to design and build. Or some kind of clever hybrid of the two.

Anyway, even though I'm quite tired of struggling with all these tedious legacy projects, I probably am not close to giving up yet. Or even if I do turn my attention to other things for a while, I'll probably return to them eventually.

In any case, please don't expect dazzling results soon, or maybe not for a very long time, and sorry I have been so incapable thus far of doing far more.

And I still don't feel up to trying to sift through whatever gigantic backlog of mostly spam (and perhaps some real emails) I might have gotten in the past several years, but, hopefully I'll get around to that someday. Sorry for being so unreachable.

And hopefully someday I'll figure out how to delete the literally hundreds of thousands of spam messages there are in the Non24.Com Forum without deleting any of the few non-spam messages, and also how to truly block new spam messages so the same thing doesn't happen again.

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The renovated Puppy Linux Setup Kit will probably require PHP and PHP-GTK

Saturday, November 26th, 2016 05:59:24 GMT

While trying to figure out the best way to do some new things with my Puppy Linux Setup Kit, I finally found out that various Unix-related systems (including GNU/Linux) are excessively flexible about what characters are allowed in file names.

Here's a detailed essay I found on that topic, from dwheeler.com:

So, that means using shell commands like "find", "xargs", etc. is much trickier and more inconvenient than I thought.

Quite annoyingly, newline characters can be in file names. So, there's no guarantee that each line of output from "find" will contain a complete file path. I also had trouble with trying to make "xargs" deal with paths containing single quotes. And the above essay describes numerous even worse problems.

These problems make me less reluctant to make the Puppy Linux Setup Kit require PHP and PHP-GTK, partly just so I can hopefully avoid a lot of the quirks of Bash programming.

I still like Bash programming much more than I used to, and I like being able to make some simple GUIs (graphical user interfaces) using only stuff that's already included by default with Puppy Linux, such as GtkDialog, which can be used to make a nice variety of GUI elements.

And I still think it was worthwhile to spend a few months struggling with Bash programming, since I learned a lot from that.

But I still have such a tremendously easier time with PHP than Bash scripts that I doubt I'll ever be fully comfortable with the latter, at this rate.

I'll probably still use Bash for simple things, but will probably use PHP for more complicated things.

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Link: Visual Programming Languages - Snapshots

Thursday, March 3rd, 2016 16:00:51 GMT

Today, I stumbled across the below blog post without even searching for stuff related to visual programming.

It's a big page with lots of pictures, so be careful if your web browser is prone to crashing.

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gun.io - A Job Website for Freelance Software Developers

Monday, November 16th, 2015 22:23:21 GMT

Freelancing

gun.io is a job website for freelance software developers. gun.io has some emphasis on free (as in freedom), libre, open source software.

I still don't feel fully qualified to undertake any of the astonishingly high-paying gigs I've seen on there lately so far, most of them paying over $10,000.

So, I haven't done any gun.io gigs, and I also don't know exactly how the site works. So, it is not first-hand experience with doing work on there which inspires me to point them out.

The top reason I'm pointing them out is because I discovered while filling out my profile that they provide affiliate marketing links, and, since gun.io has some emphasis on free/libre/open source software, and I could use some money, I thought I might as well share my link.

Here's my affiliate marketing link:

I'm fairly sure there's probably at least one brilliant, extremely talented software developer who sometimes reads my blog. Maybe more.

So, I hope this helps you, and thanks in advance if you use my affiliate marketing link to sign up with gun.io.

And I hope you'll work exclusively on free (as in freedom), libre, open source jobs, not non-libre, closed source jobs.

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Link: Programmer Competency Matrix

Tuesday, November 10th, 2015 18:25:36 GMT

Link

Zounds, I still have so much to learn!

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Apollia's JSON Prettifier v1.0

Saturday, August 22nd, 2015 20:06:13 GMT

Software Release

Today, in about a half hour (or really less than 10 minutes for the basic idea; the rest was just some slight user interface polishing), I made this really simple JavaScript thing:

I made it so I could make readable text out of JSON-format database exports generated by OrientDB.

But hopefully it will work with any JSON code, such as these examples from JSON.org.

In other news, Astroblahhh.Com continues to be a cluttered mess. But, I'm still really excited about graph databases, so, hopefully I'll be able to build something with them that will enable me to fix the mess around here at some point.

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Graph Databases - Neo4j and OrientDB

Saturday, August 15th, 2015 17:52:30 GMT

Lately, I've been feeling increasingly stifled by ordinary SQL databases, and have been wishing I had an easier, more natural and intuitive way to deal with very interconnected data.

So, I started reading about NoSQL and MongoDB, and soon stumbled across the concept of graph databases, which seem like a huge improvement on SQL in a lot of ways. (MongoDB isn't graph database software, but it might be useful too somehow - I'm still considering using it for something.)

Graph database maps look very similar to maps from the wonderful VUE concept mapping software, which I love. So, that gave me the idea that perhaps VUE could be modified to serve as a GUI for viewing and maybe even editing graph databases. I posted that idea here on the official VUE forum. I'm a Java newbie, as well as a graph database newbie, so I don't expect at all to be able to figure out how to build that myself in the near future - but, hopefully others will like the idea enough to do something with it.

The graph database software I've looked at most closely so far are Neo4j and OrientDB. Both are Java software, and free, libre, and open source (with a commercial version). Neo4j is just for graph databases, while OrientDB supports additional kinds of databases.

I've scarcely used either one for anything yet, but, they're both really cool, and I'm thinking maybe a graph database is exactly what I need for my imagined CMS (content management system, for lack of a better term), among other projects.

So, hopefully I'm now at least one step closer to having a satisfactory CMS and being able to give all my websites a much-needed renovation.

I found a CMS called Structr which uses Neo4j, but I haven't yet tried it.

It might be good, but, I'm terribly picky, so no matter how good it is, I probably will still want to write my own CMS.

The official Neo4j website currently is providing legally free (as in price) downloads of the book Graph Databases, 2nd edition, by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrém, published by O'Reilly Media: