Firefox & Thunderbird VM for Sculpt 23.04

May 9 2023 by Alexander Böttcher

With the Sculpt 23.04 release several ready-to-use VMs powered by Seoul VMM got updated to the latest version.

Disposal Firefox VM

The disposal Firefox VM package got updated to the latest Tinycore 14 version and contains the current Firefox 112 version. Thanks to the added Virtio support for audio, gpu(2D) and input in 2021-2022, the user experience got improved compared to former Seoul versions. Additionally, the uBlock Origin Add-on is now part of the VM, to manage/block advertisements effectively.

 +
   -> Depot
      -> alex-ab
        -> Firefox
          -> firefox@seoul

Thunderbird VM

Additionally, I provide a ready-to-use Thunderbird VM based upon Tinycore 14. In constrast to the disposal Firefox VM, the Thunderbird VM stores the home folder of the VM as a separated virtual disk, so changes can persist. During setup of the thunderbird@seoul package, a file_system service is requested, where the virtual disk with name block.vdi is looked for. If not existent, an empty block.vdi will be imported from the thunderbird@seoul package. This virtual disk is mounted as /home/tc in the Thunderbird VM on boot.

 +
   -> Depot
      -> alex-ab
        -> Thunderbird
          -> thunderbird@seoul

Whenever newer versions of Firefox & Thunderbird appear, I update most the time quite promptly.

In case of the Thunderbird VM, the previous mail configuration and downloaded mails are kept, due to the virtual disk support. Unfortunately, Thunderbird seems to create a new profile after each update, so that your configuration seems to be gone.

If this happens to you, open a shell in the Thunderbird VM and issue:

 thunderbird -p

Here you can select your previous profile and make it default again.

If you miss after an update your window decorations & buttons, use

Ctrl-Alt-M

once to twice to get them back.