Tag: linux

SerenityOS

For the last few months, I’ve been absolutely fascinated with the SerenityOS project and it’s awe-inspiring rate of progress. For every day that goes by, new features and bug-fixes get merged in, and development screencasts from the creator Andreas Kling are an almost daily occurence. The operating system itself follows a design philosophy that has all-but-disappeared from computing in the last 15 years or so – a philosophy that I, along with every other fan of this project, want so badly to reappear in the modern computing landscape. See below for a screenshot as of November 2019 —

Screenshot of SerenityOS as of November 2019

It could be nostalgia, real productivity value, or both that drives my want for a return this kind of desktop computing metaphor. No animations, superfluous UI trinkets, padding or dark patterns. I’d describe it as a snapshot of the personal computing metaphor where the utility value for software developers was at it’s highest; right before a seemingly general pivot from what I’d call ‘focus-on-productivity’ computing to ‘focus-on-consumption’ computing. What we left behind in the early 2000s was, in my opinion, the perfection of the desktop metaphor for computing professionals.

In a spot of boredom last night, I attempted to get SerenityOS running in a virtual machine on my Surface Book 2. This proved harder than I’d had expected, so I’ll quickly outline the steps I took to get the development build working – in case anyone else can derive some value from my learnings.

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An afternoon wasted and an exercise in partition frustration

…or “What to do if you lose Mac OS after resizing your Windows Bootcamp partition”

TLDR; Scroll to the bottom of the post where I outline the steps I took to make my Mac partition bootable again without any data loss.

I was meant to spend this afternoon completing an assignment for my course due Thursday. Instead, I nearly lost all of my programming projects dating back to when I began to take programming seriously at age twelve. This is your typical “always have and check backups story”; something I thought I was immune to – until now, at least.

It began when I decided I needed to expand my Mac’s Windows 10 Bootcamp partition. I thought this would be an easy task; I’d shrink my APFS partition from Mac OS, as Disk Utility would be the beast utility to accomplish that task, and then expand my Windows partition from Windows, as I don’t trust Mac OS to expand NTFS. Shrinking the APFS partition went swimmingly, it took about 15 minutes and apart from Disk Utility freezing, seemed to complete without a hitch.

The next step was to expand my Bootcamp NTFS partition to fill the unallocated space on the SSD. I decided to undertake this task in Windows, rather than booting a Linux live USB. The first tool I tried was the built-in Windows Disk Management, however it quickly became apparent that it cannot resize a currently mounted partition, like the Windows C: drive. So off to the internet I went, in search of a partitioning tool that could somehow accomplish this task. I landed on EaseUS Partition Master, it was a program I had heard of before and it seemed to be fairly reputable. It advertised itself as a safe way to manage partitions. This turned out, in my case, to be false.

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