my programming journey

Windows is not activated, my goodness! Windows 10 Professional was pre-installed on my Dell Inspiron 5480 when I bought it. I kept it there and kept it updated just in case I need to use any Windows application one day. Until yesterday when as usual Windows suggested another updates. I can't remember all of them but they were Windows 10 version 1909 , Intel related stuff and others . As usual I just let them all run. However this time it went really really wrong. First after a few times restarts I noticed a defaced desktop : the usual wallpaper was set to the default one and the theme was also different because the icons looked different. And second , to my horror, I saw in the Settings that Windows is now not activated !!! What the hell had happened! I shut down the system just to make sure this was only temporary. The laptop rebooted, but I noticed the grub menu for dual boot had disappeared . It booted directly into Windows. And the defaced desktop and the deactivated Wind

Kubuntu 20.04 on Dell Inspiron 5480 I have had another issue with Kubuntu. Really strange that as an Ubuntu-based distro Kubuntu has a few problems while the others don't. This time Kubuntu has problem installing chromium browser. As you may know Ubuntu has shifted Chromium to snap in 20.04. So when I tried to install chromium with sudo snap install chromium I got this error "error: cannot communicate with server: timeout exceeded while waiting for response" I checked the snapd status and it was running... So I didn't have any idea. Until by chance I found out the error has to do with missing snap-store. In short after I installed snap-store everything runs well. Oh... Kubuntu.

The solution to the boot issue provided by Lifehacker Recently I wanted to boot a physical Ubuntu installation in a Virtualbox machine. The target Ubuntu is in the partition 5 on the same disk where the host is (also an Ubuntu 20.04 OS) on partition 6. I followed the instruction provided by Virtualbox here  and this one from serverwatch.com . However when I tried to create the vmdk file with this command: VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ubuntu.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/nvme0n1 -partitions 5 I couldn't go past the error VERR_ACCESS_DENIED. Even the solution posted here on superuser.com didn't help. After wasting some time with this issue I finally found the solution: the user should have the right to access the disk , so make sure your user account is included in the group disk (/etc/group). So the first hurdle passed.  Please note however in the end I didn't proceed with accessing the Ubuntu installation on my ssd, where my host OS also resides. I find it t

Kubuntu Virtualbox Settings I must not be the only one with this problem, so I decided to write down this solution to help others. After using Ubuntu 20.04 for almost two weeks and being very happy with it I could resist the temptation to test some Ubuntu-based distros in Virtualbox. Most of them work flawlessly with the exception of Kubuntu 20.04. Kubuntu would always boot with 800x600 resolution. And every time I changed the settings to a higher resolution Kubuntu would revert back to that low resolution display. I thought the issue would resolve by installing the Virtualbox Guest Additions, however the problem persisted. After trying different settings without success I changed the Graphic Controller in Kubuntu Virtualbox Settings to VBoxVGA ( see the picture above ). Of course as you can see in that picture Virtualbox fires a warning of Invalid settings detected . But this "invalid setting" solves the issue at least partially . Now Kubuntu can resize to diffe