Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
For the moment Sitecore don't support Windows 11 for installing XM or XP - but since Microsoft have a fairly agressive policy of rolling it out to machines currently running Windows 10 and installing it by default on new hardware, there are a fair few developers out there finding themselves having to work out how to get it to work...
Recently I needed to do an odd bit of printing. I needed to generate an A3 PDF for printing which had crop marks around it. That means it needs to be printed to "a bit larger than A3" size. In the past I'd used Foxit's PDF printer for this (where it just worked), but that no longer seems to be free. Turns out the default Windows PDF printer needs a bit of hackery to enable using odd-sized paper. I'm sure I'll find myself needing to do this again in the future, so this is a reminder for my future self.
One of the things I've been doing over the festive period is reinstalling some laptops. While it's usually a slightly tedious job, something Microsoft have done to the Windows Installer of late has made picking the Windows version you want harder than it should be. So I'm leaving myself a note for next time I crash into this problem...
A couple of times recently, I've found myself needing to deploy files that come wrapped in a
.tar.gz
archive onto servers. On your desktop that's not too much of a problem – you just run the installer for your preferred
3rd party tool, or maybe
use the new Unixy shell
and you get on with it. But on client servers security can be higher and you don't always get the option to run any old installer. So I needed an alternative...
Ages ago I wrote myself some notes on setting up Windows Server Essentials on Intel NUC hardware. Recently I did an upgrade on one of these machines, and ended up in a world of pain. Google was very thin on information to help me try and sort this out, so I figured this needed writing up...
I've been reinstalling some PCs recently, and one of them is the machine I play games on in front of the TV. My eldest child still enjoys a bit of Minecraft every so often, so I needed to put that back on my freshly formatted machine – but this proved more difficult than I was expecting.
I'm pretty sure I must have encountered this issue before, but since googling failed to find my blog, I seem to have failed to write the solution down last time 😉 So, in order to save my future self working this out for third time...
The other week I mentioned I'd suffered a hard drive failure on my laptop. Other than the git issues I wrote about last time, I had another issue that seemed worth writing up: How to get all of the user data for the rebuilt install on a separate drive to the programs and operating system. If that's something you might want to do with a Windows install then read on...
Having upgraded my computer to Windows 10, I found myself unable to install updates to VirtualBox. After downloading the 4.3.40 (build 101610) release, clicking the installer immediately gave the error:
Like many people around the internet, I've upgraded my computer to Windows 10 this weekend. So far I'm reasonably happy with the upgrade – most of my stuff has continued to work fine, and the few installation issues I hit were already well documented by the internet community. I will admit to a bit of "who moved my cheese" style frustration at some of the changes though – but I'm sure that will pass as I get used to them...
But I also came across one issue I wasn't expecting which I had a bit more trouble finding the answer to: What happens if your PC was connected to a Windows Server Essentials domain for backup and then you try to upgrade?
