nix-config VS libguestfs

I bought a Brother HL-L2320D which at the time was the cheapest mono laser with duplexing I could find. On Windows and macOS it's fantastically uneventful, unfortunately on Linux the situation is less great. brlaser [0] does mostly work, but it seems there is a bug as some more complex documents (typically scans) won't print [1]. I ended up patching my version to reduce the size of one of the buffers [2], and haven't seen it fail since, but I doubt I've actually fixed the issue and instead just moved the threshold.

[0] - https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser

[1] - https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser/issues/79#issuecomment-7...

[2] - https://github.com/benpye/nix-config/blob/main/overlays/brla...

HVF works with some patches that are on the mailing list; it's possible to get Nix to build it with an overlay. [1] for the base, then apply [2] to SLIRP if you don't want to use HVF's network adapter (which needs root). I'm happily running FreeBSD and Linux VMs on my Mac Mini with this

[1]: https://github.com/benpye/nix-config/tree/main/overlays/qemu

[2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp/-/commit/72713...

We started off doing this, but you end up with enormous diffs which are themselves confusing. Example, only about 5% of this change is non-generated:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/5186251f8f68...

And inside the registry. The apparently correct way to distinguish them is using the build ID:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/824c74574893...

NDB works great but another option is libguestfs. https://libguestfs.org/

Have a look here

Consider using libguestfs.

There's a lot of useful command-line tooling for KVM and QEMU-based virt. Here's a small selection of useful tools:

• virsh — This[1] is libvirt's shell interface; and gives you access to the rich set of libvirt APIs.

• virt-builder — Use this for rapidly building minimal or customized virtual machines; it's greatly flexible; check out its man page[2]. And here's[3] a quick example that connects both virt-builder and virsh together.

• virt-install — Use this if you don't like the default build of the template images from virt-builder; it lets you create "headless" servers via 'kickstart' and Linux OS trees from the command-line.

• guestfish and libguestfs suite[4] — This rich set of tools help you in a variety of use-cases: repairing your broken disk images, editing, cloning, debugging disk images, and more. It has saved my behind a lot of times.

• qemu-img[5] – This Swiss Army knife lets you powerfully manipulate disk images (QCOW2, raw, et al) offline. Example operations include: create images, backing chains, offline snapshots, disk image merging, and convert disk images from one format to another, and more.

[1] https://libvirt.org/manpages/virsh.html

[2] https://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html

[3] https://developer.fedoraproject.org/tools/virt-builder/about...

[4] http://libguestfs.org/

[5] https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/qemu-img.html

That's a good point. As long as the project has a setup.py or pyproject.toml available, it can usually be installed from the repo. For libguestfs it looks like they do some pre-processing on their setup.py so that wouldn't work, it's lucky that they had this alternative set up already. :)

Nah, this virt-install preseed script is faster, or even just run virt-builder debian-10 and they're both libvirt not hacky qemu scripts