VirtualBox Adventures

 Well I'm continuing this blog for a second day... kind of quaint to be utilizing such an outdated form of media sharing. People mostly convey their daily thoughts through Twitter or YouTube. Twitter is as bustling as ever but sites like Tumblr and Facebook are slowly losing traction. (Good.) The only reason Blogspot still exists is probably because it hosts a lot of non-blog sites. I would've used Google+ instead if it hadn't shut down, as Google is probably the most tolerable corporation that maintains social applications. Of course, Google+ is indeed no more so I took to another star in their constellation of sub-brands. As a side note, my parents each used to have a blog and it's how they met a good chunk of their friends, although that medium of friend-making has probably long since died down.

Now to the main topic of today's post, VirtualBox. If you, dear reader, aren't aware of what VirtualBox is, allow me to provide a brief summary. Essentially, it is a free and open source application that allows you to run operating systems within the operating system you have installed on your personal computer. I initially tried to run ReactOS, a project that has been attempting to reverse-engineer the source code of the Windows kernel since 2003... they're still in alpha stages. I ended up going in circles a lot and was unable to actually boot to the desktop so I posted about it on the forums and hours later, I am still awaiting an answer. I may ask about it in their discord server after school tomorrow if the forums continue to be of no use to me. After failing to get ReactOS up and running, I decided to instead download an iso for Manjaro Linux. My only experience with Linux up until this point was a few years of the Debian-based distro of Ubuntu and the GNOME desktop interface. I wanted to try something new, but not too new, so I kept GNOME but went for the aforementioned Arch-based distro, Manjaro. I got it running and experimented a bit with the package manager, which was slightly harder to get the hang of. Manjaro, like all Arch-based distros, uses the pacman manager, which has a few extra syntax steps compared to the apt package manager commonly found in Debian-based distributions. That's pretty much all I have to say for today's post.

-Kit

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