14 December, 2012

Portable Virtualbox with Alpine Linux

Introduction:

I have a need for a small yet functional, portable, virtualised Linux system with a graphical web-browser, so I set-about finding one.
Firstly I needed a portable virtualisation environment (Hosting on Windows is all I need) and a small linux distribution to run on it.
I decided on using Portable-VirtualBox for the virtualisation, because it's free-of-charge, easy to download and configure (Although it seems to claim to be more portable than it actually is).
I used Alpine Linux for the guest OS distributions because it's about the most microscopic distro I've found with a moderately easy to configure GUI capability.
The install's not perfect, but it's "good enough for me". Here's the basic steps involved in this installation:

06 December, 2012

Bat-Slap Retro-vectored


I was always impressed with the dynamic impact of this popular panel from World's Finest Comics #153 (1965). It just irked me how bad all the scans of it are. It was crying out for an SVG do-over, so I've finally done that!

Here's the original Inkscape SVG (With no text). Here's a "Plain" SVG, which might be more compatible with other applications: Batslap-plain

I should add that this was done using the magnificent Inkscape tool and the sample PNG uses Neale Davidson's nice Comic Book font.