Thursday, December 3, 2015

VirtualBox on OS X with Windows 10 guest and the ctrl key

Karabiner allows you to disable ctrl+left click on OS X. That will, by default, do the same thing that right-click does with a mouse. You choose the following option to disable it:



So here's where things go bad. If you run VirtualBox and you run a Windows 10 system, you have to turn this off. I believe I had this on due to an early version of VirtualBox not handling ctrl+left click, but they seem to have fixed this in the latest version... ironically my workaround that fixed my issue now breaks it!

Monday, November 30, 2015

Bypassing the compatibility checker when upgrading from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 in VirtualBox

I use OS X as my primary operating system, but still need to use Windows so I've installed Windows 8.1 as a VirtualBox Virtual Machine. Recently I decided that I wanted to upgrade to Windows 10, but when I do Windows complains it doesn't like the VirtualBox Graphics Adapter for Windows 8:


I got quite busy, but recently I decided to find out how to resolve this. A (very) cursory Google search wasn't terribly helpful, so I decided to see what registry keys Windows looks for when it checks for compatibility. For this task I used Process Monitor - the process is called GWXUX.exe so I restricted the capture to only the registry and added the filter: Process Name is GWXUX.exe


A quick scroll through the output showed that there is a registry DWORD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade\AllowOSUpgrade


This is set to 0x0, but if you change it to 0x1, then you can upgrade in Windows Update itself (note, if you click on the upgrade to Windows 10 icon in the system notification tray it will still run the compatibility check). 


Hopefully someone will find this useful. I can only imagine VMware installs might be getting the same issue, so this key will force an upgrade. I should note that if you set this key on anything other than VirtualBox and do an OS upgrade you do so at your own risk :-) 

Monday, March 2, 2015

OSI membership

I've just joined the OSI as a member - in AUD it is about $50, but it's well worth it!

The reason I became a member was because I thought it was high time that I did this. I contribute to LibreOffice, and I truly believe that open source and open culture is very important to society at large. I believe that open source gives maximum freedom to those in society who are not necessarily empowered due to economic or social circumstances. It levels the playing field, and what I most love is that it really gives transparency to those who use software so that they can verify and improve upon the work of those who have gone before them, without restricting the ability of others to use the work to improve the conditions and lives of others in society.

I encourage others to also join the OSI, as it is really is a force of good in the world.