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yeh, why install take the easy route and install the ~90MB arduino IDE when you can download a few GB of MS stuff a spend forever to try and get it set up to do the same ...

Nonsense. Arduino is trivial to set up, almost too easy. Low barrier to entry is its primary design goal, after all. If you found it too hard you should go back to banging rocks together.

Although the IDE is written in Java, it comes with a recent GCC (written in C) for the AVR. You can even ignore the sucky Arduino library system and build everything from scratch.

You can also set it up to handle other languages and other compilers, and that's where folk can have some difficulty.

VS is the most powerful development environment ever. The core design of Eclipse was copied from it wholesale. I doubt that anyone even knows all of what's in VS, let alone how to use it, and no-one would want to. Being a monolith does have some advantages to counter the huge initial size.

Clifford Heath

Haven't tried it yet. I'm just going by the forum comments.

One complication is I'll be using Teensy. Version 3 is different from Version 2.

Cannot run Java. It destroyed one computer.

GCC can work great for some people, and give problems for others. See

How to Install the Latest GCC on Windows

This situation seems common in the Arduino world.

VS finally installed. It didn't break the computer, but I had to reactivate Win 7. It seems hugely complex, which means problems trying to get it to run.

Nonsense. You got some malware, and took the coincidence as causation. You should know better.

Java has no special system access that would allow it to overwrite your boot sector. It's a user-mode program that happens to run other programs.

If it was even possible, the weakness would have been used in a global malware attack by now.

You contradict yourself.

How so?

In fairness I suppose it would be *theoretically* possible for an installer to do this, certainly on Ubuntu and I am guessing on windows too.

Lots of possibilities far more likely than Java doing it though. Google seems never to have heard of such a thing.

He claims I caught malware, that Java has no capability to overwrite the MBR, that it would require malware to do that, and that if malware were present, it would have caused a global malware attack by now.

There has been no global malware attack, and therefore there was no malware on my computer.

He claims JAVA has no capability to overwrite the MBR. But the installation program can do anything, and that's when my computer died.

He has no knowlege of my installation and jumps to conclusions about malware.

I run Ubuntu as a host for Windows running in VirtualBox. It is entirely possible the JAVA installation program triggered some problem in Virtualbox that destroyed the MBR. I have noticed problems using old AT-style keyboards that caused wierd interactions with Ubuntu that required a reboot. This was solved by using modern keyboards.

I use a number of programs to ensure there is no malware on my computers. Among them, I use Rootkit Revealer by Sysinternals, plus an old Windows 98 program that verifies the integrity of files in any folders I choose. This program is no longer available, and it won't run on Win7 or above. The later versions only run in a few folders selected by Microsoft.

There was no malware, there is none on my computers, and I won't allow JAVA or programs that need it on my computers.

Anyway, I have found a simple solution to programming the Teensy without needing Arduino software or JAVA.

How do you design electronics when you fail so badly at logic?

If what you downloaded actually was a Java installer (from an official site, not some website you picked at random because it happened to say "Java") then that installer did not damage your computer. Therefore if your computer was damaged, something else did it. It happened at the same time. Correlation is not causation.

Or do you seriously think that an official Java installer had such malware, and the global effects of that have somehow been hushed up? Next you'll be bleating about chemtrails, sheesh, because you're making no sense. A billion or more computers with Java installed, and you're the only one to realize it destroys computers? Get real.

The malware claim has a serious flaw. Malware that destroyed the MBR wouldn't get very far.

Installation software that destroyed the MBR wouldn't get very far either.

The installation was not for Ubuntu. It was for Windows running in VirtualBox with Ubuntu as host.

It is far more likely that the installation triggered a crash, and just by sheer bad luck the cpu wrote over the MBR.

Windows 98 used to crash regularly. It crosslinked file clusters, corrupting both files.

Moving to XP was a huge improvement with the NTFS file system. The crashes disappeared almost completely, and there were no more crosslinked clusters.

Moving Ubuntu from ext3 to ext4 also made a huge improvement, as well as upgrading VirtualBox from version 3.0 to 4.3. The system is now as solid as a rock.

The only crashes I get now are from static discharges into the ground plane. My desktop is a large sheet of stainless steel. The case of the computer is connected to the steel through a 3/4" aluminum angle bracket.

I have a static dissipator that discharges static electricity from my body through eight 10 megohm resistors in series to the desktop. It works, but often when I forget, I get a hot spark to the stainless. This can crash the computer, but it doesn't corrupt any files either in Windows or in Ubuntu. It requires a hard reboot to get everything back online. So if you live in Canada or Colorado where it gets very dry in the winter, think about making a static dissipator it you find you are getting a lot of crashes.

It's hardly javas fault if virtualbox crashed, and you say you have upgraded VB since and it has become more stable. It is a rather serious bug in VB if a program running under it can erase the host MBR!

However I have actually had this happen but only when using the not-recommended "raw" disk access mode. (In my case with a windows host and ubuntu guest). If you do this with the C drive, say, then the guest can and will overwrite the host hard drive bootsector whenever it feels like it. It will not be able to see the host installation, so will not include that in the list of operating systems to boot so making the host unbootable.

The problem was not with JAVA. It never got a chance to run. The problem was with the installer. It looks like there was some problem with VirtualBox that caused the crash while it was writing to the disk. All it would take is a garbled seek command that ended up on the MBR. A crash is a crash. It can do anything. It can be something as simple as a stack overflow. VM's are much more complex, so there's a greater chance of error. Obviously the installer knows nothing about writing in a VM, so it's possible it tried to execute some command that VirtualBox didn't expect. Or maybe there was a bug in the installer that would have been ignored if it was writing to a normal Windows installation. Or maybe it only showed up on XP. We will never know.

Reformat and reinstall. Painful with Windows. That's one reason I like running Windows in a vm. If I screw up, all I have to do is copy the vdi from the backup. That is fast and easy, and gives a byte-identical copy of the vdi the last time it was backed up. Since it is so quick to copy, it is easy to take the time to make backups.

It also allows me to separate critical files from ordinary browsing. Foe example, all the financial sites are on their own banking vm and separate from the browsing vm. So if the browsing vm gets nailed by malware, it cannot reach the banking vm and cannot infect it. Same with phishing attacks. The only place email is available is on the browsing vm. Any attacks, even if I was so stupid as to click on a link, can do nothing to the banking vm.

Another benefit is I can run different Windows versions at the same time. For example, I detest Win7. It is so slow and sluggish, and will not run my file checking programs, that I hate to use it. But sometimes I need to to run a particular program like Firefox V47 for some wierd site. All I need to do is run the Win7 vdi file. I don't have to exit the main browsing vdi which runs XP. So then I have XP and Win7 running simultaneously. Then if I need to do some banking, I simply run the bank vdi, and then I have all three running at the same time. Then I want to change the streaming music site which is running in Ubuntu. It is completely independent of VirtualBox, so I can do anything I want there.

The advantages of running Windows in VirtualBox under Ubuntu are so overwhelming I can't think of any better way to operate a computer.

Just for completeness, the installation file could have been corrupted. Without a MD5 or SHA-1 or SHA-2 hash, there is no way to verify the file.

OK but it seems a shame to blacklist Java forevermore just because some ancient version of VB may have had a bug (which was quite possibly totally unrelated to the java installer). Blacklisting VB would seem more reasonable :)

I ran like that too for many years, but have had to chage to a windows host recently due to Altium not working on my system under VB :(

So I try to just use the host for that.

For many years up until recently Java was notorious for including bundled malware. (ask.com toolbar and/or yahoo something or other IIRC).

You had to be very careful to deselect it during the install and - much worse - during each automatic update.

The installer may have been corrupt. Without a MD5 or SHA-1 or SHA-2 hash, there is no way to tell.

JAVA is notorious for vulnerabilities. I don't need it and won't use it.

I think you will find that's more the browser plugins rather than the language? Anyway, never mind, you another solution.