Tag: machine

Cannot load VirtualBox after upgrading Ubuntu

If your computer uses SecureBoot, you may occasionally encounter this problem after upgrading the operating system. Thankfully, the solution is simple after some initial setup the first time.

The error generally reads something like: Could not load ‘modprobe vboxdrv’

First time:

  1. Create signing keys:

    openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout MOK.priv -outform DER -out MOK.der -nodes -days 36500 -subj "/CN=Descriptive name/"

  2. Sign the module (vboxdrv for this example):

    sudo /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 ./MOK.priv ./MOK.der $(modinfo -n vboxdrv)

  3. Register the keys to Secure Boot:

    sudo mokutil --import MOK.der

  4. Supply a password for later use after reboot
  5. Reboot and follow instructions to Enroll MOK (Machine Owner Key).
  6. Restart after enrolling
  7. After the reboot, you may also need to load the module:
    sudo modprobe vboxdrv

After future updates you might re-encounter the problem, then you just need:

  1. sudo /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 ./MOK.priv ./MOK.der $(modinfo -n vboxdrv)
  2. sudo modprobe vboxdrv

REFERENCES:

Fixing the Windows 7 is not genuine message

While I’ve run various builds of Linux for many years, I still have to routinely test my work in Windows. While I often attempt to keep my laptops able to dual-boot into Windows, that only (realistically) supports only a single version of Windows. For older versions, I generally rely upon VirtualBox and can then have different configurations available when needed, while keeping my Linux apps open too!

Occasionally, I’ve had a virtual machine running a licensed copy of Windows 7 start warning that it is not activated. This can prove to be annoying for several reasons, as such I did some research and found that others have encountered the same problem and shared the below solutions.

First method:

  1. Open a command prompt in Administrator mode.
  2. Execute “slmgr -rearm”
  3. NOTE: some sites tell you to locate and remove “slui.exe” – DO NOT DO THIS!
  4. Restart Windows
  5. Problem should be resolved

Alternative – reactive with your product key:

  1. Open a command prompt in Administrator mode.
  2. Execute “slmgr –upk
  3. Execute “slmgr –ipk (your product key)
  4. Restart Windows
  5. Problem should be resolved

REFERENCES:

Microsoft Virtual PC

I happened to spend most of this week in an IBM class using VMWare for the training environment (Windows XP Pro hosted on a Windows 2000 machine). This got me wondering about the free systems offered by many providers.

Here’s a few quick thoughts on Microsoft‘s offering, which admittedly seems pretty good.

Their product overview shows that you can run most (all?) previous Microsoft Operating System’s (MS-DOS, Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista… etc. ), even IBM’s OS/2 all on a single host machine with enough resources. Minimum usage per VM appears to be about 64MB RAM and 500MB disk space for the older OS’s, newer versions obviously requiring significantly more resources.

Since I’ve got most of these old OS installation disks in storage, I’ll give this a try and see how well it works. This may make for some interesting testing lab scenarios.

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