More Windows w/o admin
Downloaded the 7z from https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.2.2/windows/64-bit/compressed-7z/dl/
Unzipped it so there is now a folder in:
C:\Users\darren\installs\inkscape-1.2.2_2022-12-09_732a01da63-x64
Now, in my bin folder (which is in my path), make inkscape.bat:
start C:\Users\darren\installs\inkscape-1.2.2_2022-12-09_732a01da63-x64\bin\inkscape %*
And so I can launch it any way I want. All good.
Have a client who cannot use DropBox, HighTail and similar for security reasons, but can accept files by email.
How to send a big file?
Am trying 7-Zip.
(1) Run 7-Zip
(2) Navigate to the file I want to send
(3) Highlight it and click Add
(4) Fill out the resulting dialogue as follows (note that I types 4M in the bytes box, you are not limited to the options in the drop-down menu):
(5) The files end up in the same directory as the big file. The listing looks like this:
H:\>dir c:\users\username\temp\7ztest\big* Volume in drive C is OS Volume Serial Number is XXXX-XXXX Directory of c:\users\username\temp\7ztest 13/09/2019 10:38 AM 4,194,304 bigfile.7z.001 13/09/2019 10:38 AM 4,194,304 bigfile.7z.002 13/09/2019 10:38 AM 4,194,304 bigfile.7z.003 13/09/2019 10:38 AM 4,194,304 bigfile.7z.004 13/09/2019 10:38 AM 2,126,950 bigfile.7z.005 13/09/2019 10:38 AM 205,824 bigfile.exe 12/09/2019 03:59 PM 20,513,175 bigfile.txt 7 File(s) 39,623,165 bytes 0 Dir(s) 78,899,724,288 bytes free
Where bigfile.txt has been split into bigfile.exe plus the 5 (001 to 005) components of the archive.
To reassemble, can run the exe from the command prompt, or just double-click it. Just keep all the files together!
Some email programs/security programs don’t like emailing .exe files, so may need to rename it (say .doc) then change it back at the other end.
Your mileage may vary enormously.
The hardest part was explaining to a not-very-tech-savvy person at the other end what to do.
My (now aging) desktop machine runs Debian current perfectly snappily. It’s an i7-2600K with 8G RAM and a couple of TB HD. Nothing exotic these days, though when I first got it Debian was not up to date enough and I had to install a backports kernel — far too much work for my liking.
I’ve been having some issues with flaky HD access, and while I think it is a slightly poor motherboard (bad SATA connectors or something — I’ve tried many cables), I figured I was running an oldish BIOS version and a newer one might be better.
Now, flashing BIOS is a bit scary. If it goes wrong you can brick the machine. But when I saw that the newest version (even if 5+ years old) was F8 and I was running F3, I figured it might be possible that there was a bug or something that had been fixed in one of the 5 newer versions.
Read about Qflash:
https://www.gigabyte.com/FileUpload/global/WebPage/20/images/utility_qflash.pdf
Seemed OK. Just find the file, copy it to USB stick, reboot, hit ‘End’ while powering on and then follow the menu prompts.
The BIOS image I found on the website was:
mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe
at
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-H67MA-USB3-B3-rev-10#support-dl-bios
(Gigabyte GA-H67MA-USB3-B3 is printed on my motherboard).
Downloaded, copied it to USB and in my ignorance rebooted. First I followed the instruction in the PDF and saved the old BIOS image to the USB stick, and then I realised I could not find the new one.
Exited without making any changes and revisited the website.
Looked closer at the file names in the Qflash examples (in PDF noted above) and realised they look nothing like mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe; took a guess — maybe the exe file is a Windows self-extracting archive. Yes, it’s obvious to you, but I’ve not done this before, not much.
But I am on Debian … not Windows. Tried just unzipping it ($ unzip mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe) but unzip did not like that. Threw errors.
OK.
Went to folder where mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe was kept and:
$ mkdir flashbios $ mv mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe flashbios/ $ cd flashbios/ $ wine mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe
Wine (which is apparently not an emulator), ran perfectly (version 1.8.7) and yes some files leapt out of the exe file. So:
$ ls autoexec.bat FLASHSPI.EXE h7mausb3.f8 mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe
Now, there is another option.
These are ‘7zip’ files, so can also type:
$ 7z e mb_bios_ga-h67ma-usb3-b3_f8.exe
where ‘e’ means ‘extract’. Whatever. Both work. I only figured out the 7z thing after first running Wine because it popped up a dialogue box that said ‘7z self-extracting archive’.
OK, so the file I need is h7mausb3.f8 (note it sticks to DOS 8.3 file naming rules).
Copied that file to the USB, rebooted and it all went smoothly.
Whether I have solved the issues I was having I don’t know (and actually I doubt) but the machine’s working, so that’s something.
DSPACE 