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Free Windows 10 VM

Posted on February 25, 2021February 23, 2021 by David

You can get a special developer enabled VM of Windows 10 for VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and Parallels. This VM has a time limited version, expiring in April 2021 of Windows 10 (2004 version), and includes Visual Studio with the UWP, .NET desktop, and Azure workflows enabled and also includes the Windows Template Studio extension, Visual Studio Code, plus Windows Subsystem for Linux enabled with Ubuntu installed and Developer mode enabled.

It’s a 20 GB download that you can get here. The screenshot is Window 10 (fully licensed!) running under Hyper-V. I keep some old development software on it that’s a real pain to reinstall. I just have to keep it backed up and can easily copy it to my next PC. Much less hassle!

Expanding my virtual hard disk

Posted on June 5, 2020May 30, 2020 by David

Most Linux development is done on Ubuntu running under Hyper-V on my Windows 10 PC. If you have lots of RAM (and I have a full 64 GB), it’s very convenient. I run Snagit on Windows and this makes it very easy to grab screenshots of the Ubuntu window.

I also have a “Raspberry-pi” running under Hyper-V. There’s a Raspbian desktop that you can download and run in Hyper-V, VirtualBox or VMWare though I’ve only done Hyper-V. Don’t forget when you are running a Raspberry Pi this way that its x86 based not ARM. That does affect the available software, so it doesn’t behave exactly like a real Pi though often close enough.

Today though I started getting low disk space from my virtual Ubuntu. That’s the problem with virtual machines. When you first setup a Virtual hard disk, you never know just how much disk space you will need.

There’s a terminal command that shows how much space you have left.

df -h --total

This produced this

david@david-Virtual-Machine:~$ df -h --total
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            942M     0  942M   0% /dev
tmpfs           193M  1.4M  192M   1% /run
/dev/sda1        11G  9.9G  603M  95% /
tmpfs           964M     0  964M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           964M     0  964M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda15      105M  3.6M  101M   4% /boot/efi
tmpfs           193M   16K  193M   1% /run/user/121
tmpfs           193M   24K  193M   1% /run/user/1000
total            14G  9.9G  4.1G  71% -

This was after I’d extended my virtual hard disk. You can see I now have 4.1 GB free.

The pretty picture is from a utility filelight. You install it in the usual way

sudo apt install filelight

Or if you prefer a more visual insight, install qdirstat.

sudo apt install qdirstat

This is like WinDirStat on Windows but qdirstat seems to run many times faster. It took a couple of seconds to produce this image below. WinDirStat would take 10-30 minutes.

So how did I expand my Hyper-V hard drive?

First you have to get rid of any checkpoints. Save your Hyper-V session if open then delete the checkpoint.

Right click on the checkpoint for the selected VM and click delete. This will take a minute or two and you’ll see it have a Merging status. You may need to shutdown the VM.

After that you can go into the settings and it will let you edit the virtual hard drive and change the size.

Developing for Raspberry Pi without one

Posted on May 10, 2020April 29, 2020 by David

Yes it is possible, as the screenshot shows. You can download a copy of Raspbian from Raspberry-pi. You can either download the .iso directly or save them a bit of bandwidth and do it via a file Torrent. It then takes about 15 minutes or so to install it. When you first run it, it will do an update.

It looks exactly like Raspbian on a PI but there are one or two little things to bear in mind. It’s 32-bit, the clipboard doesn’t seem to work and SSH by default is disabled. It’s real easy to enable it, just find Raspberry Pi Configuration. Click the Raspberry in a circle menu button at the top, then click Preferences and there it is on the menu that pops up. In the Interfaces tab, tick the Enabled checkbox for SSH.

I use the excellent WinSCP to connect to it. Conveniently the Pi will show you its ip address (or from a terminal run ifconfig and it will show you the ip address of eth0) and just put that in with username pi and your pi’s password which you should have changed when you set up Raspbian.

Finally you have to install Visual Studio Code and as usual, it’s not quite so easy. Most Linux distros these days are 64-bit and the official VS Code is only available for Debian in 64-bit and Raspbian is of course 32-bit. But there are community builds and it’s the same place that I got the ARM version from.

And here’s the result. A slightly sluggish (well it is under Hyper-V). I had to comment out the code that initialises the audio. Line 580 ish.

/*	int success=Mix_OpenAudio(22050, AUDIO_S16LSB, 2, 8192);
	if (success==-1 ) {
		LogError("InitSetup failed to init audio");
	}
	LoadSoundFiles();
*/

And here’s the results.