i will be doing another #pkgconf dev stream in an hour or so! this one will mostly be about pkgconf on windows platforms, it is finally time to clean up the mess.

this one will be on both youtube & twitch because no 24 hour waiting period this time!

or maybe not? libvirt is being annoying

hmm...

why is libvirt

@ariadne I do not miss my libvirt days.

@ariadne if it was a little smoother itself, it probably made sense 20 years ago. 15 years ago it was more complicated to use than the individual vms it wrapped, but no idea how it evolved.

@ariadne Red Hat.

@ariadne Make something better.

No, seriously, please do. Libvirt sucks but sadly it is the best there is. (And don't come with Xen, that sucks UX wise way more right now).

But maybe VMware having been ripped out of everyone but Enterprises by Broadcom will cause someone to actually program something better...

@agowa338 xen is not the same thing as libvirt, and alpine already has qemu-openrc for "long-lived VMs"

i want something like virtualbox tho

@ariadne

Well you need libvirt when you want to use e.g. virt-manager. And so far I do not know of any tooling that has similar UX.

And how is Xen different (don't come with type 1 and 2 hypervisor) in the end it is just the same "user wants to run VM(s)...

(I'm talking for SOHO and enthusiast usage here btw)

@agowa338 xen is a hypervisor, libvirt is a control plane. these are not the same.

@ariadne Oh that's what you mean. My bad then.

I somehow always think of "QEMU/KVM and libvirt" as one...

@agowa338 nope, you can even use libvirt with xen

okay, here we go...

@ariadne I think the VM name is hilarious

@felixs oh i just went and downloaded windows server 2025 evaluation because ... eh, why not

windows is already trying to outsmart me, but i ain't having it

i'm told i can enable SSH on windows now, how do i do it?

ugh, i am going to have to use... PowerShell. i'm so sorry @bagder

@ariadne if it’s not already there, you need to “add features” to add the SSH client and/or server, then services control panel to enable. Also, enable the ssh-agent service while you’re there for some reason it ships as disabled instead of automatic.

@fun in a moment... i was setting up windows first

stream starting in 5 or so minutes!

https://twitch.tv/kaniini_

(i was going to also stream to youtube but i need to do a little bit of experimentation with it first to get my bearings)

@ariadne And there was I, convinced this was a reference to Windows 2000

@ariadne You go into the shitty settings dialogue and on some install optional features thingy and then select openssh. (or from the GitHub repo for a bit more recent version, but it won't be updated with windows then).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/openssh/openssh_install_firstuse?tabs=gui&pivots=windows-server-2025

Also you'll have to change a windows service in services.msc from manual to automatic for SSH-Agent to work (admin rights required) as microsoft wants to keep the private keys outside of the users session.

@ariadne @bagder Compared to the old batch files, PowerShell is just mildly horrific.

@ariadne @bagder I recall a disturbing number of tildes being involved.

@ariadne It's awful.

I had to build my own defshell.exe to be able to log into MSYS2 with the right environment instead of cmd.exe, because you can't launch scripts or specify arguments for the DefaultShell. It's a std-only Rust program; I can upload the main.rs if you're interested.

If you log in to a new desktop session on the same user as an already active SSH session, it seems to mess up the credential storage somehow. Some desktop apps will not find their saved creds/tokens.

@heftig i got it working enough to debug the windows-specific problem i was chasing down

@ariadne starting with a classic "pipewire restart™" then ssh'ing into a windows... spooky stuff going on here :)))

@jon i wanted to use a terminal emulator that was good...