A Geek Goes Flying

I’ve dabbled in retro gaming a couple of times. I have a Raspberry Pi 3B (I’m pretty sure?) (in a bitchin’ case ) running RetroPi somewhere, and this past holiday season I setup an RPi 5 8GB , again with RetroPi, to host some Castlevania sessions and to play old school classics like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Xevious and Raiden . But now ... A random news article about the impact of Trump’s tariffs bumbling on retro gaming hardware vendors prompted my idle investigation and adding some $60 or so RG35XX devices to my Eternal Shopping Cart™, and then a chance encounter with a friend at a bar where he was raving about a similar device, and I decided to get serious and pull the trigger. Research led me to seriously consider the Retroid 5 , which can boot into Linux and has a full Android stack as well. (It’s probably overkill for the games I want to play on it today, but it leaves open the door for newer stuff down the road.) So that’s what I picked up, apparently in ...

UTM can Virtualize or Emulate Following the instructions here , I got Ubuntu up and running (virtualized, not emulated, using ubuntu-22.04.3-live-server-arm64.iso) on an M2 MacBook Air. (To do: Setup an Intel version under emulation; could that be virtualized on Intel Macs? Different metadata but same disk images? Curious.) Setup with 2048MB, 2 CPU cores, OpenGL acceleration disabled, 32GB virtual disk. For a moment I got a message about the display not being active, but it powered through and rewarded my patience. Comparing the base model MacBook Air M2 13.6" to my NAS (an old HP Microserver with an Intel® Celeron® CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz ) with sysbench :   Celeron M2 CPU speed (events per second) 620.71 9277.71 Number of events 6209 92791 Okay, yeah, even with the UTM overhead, that’s fast enough to be usable. What about Fedora for Intel? Setting up a new VM with Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-39-1.5.iso, with System: “Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009) (alias of pc-q35-7...