Re: Advice re running Windows in/with Linux

Hi,

My advice is dated, but hopefully provides some guidance:

ONE:
Your machine specs should be fine for virtualisation, depending on what you
want to run, of course.

For what sound like the same reasons (I need Windows for some stuff, and
rebooting is a waste of time) I've been running Windows as a VM in
VirtualBox for years, though I'm still running WinXP, so your mileage may
vary. I've no experience of running later versions of Windows in a VM on
Linux. Hopefully someone else can provide some pointers.

Note that there are some limitations on use of peripherals (like USB and
external drives) with VMs under VirtualBox. If possible, test before
committing to a final strategy.

Also, I've had varied luck running old Windows games under VirtualBox,
mostly related to graphics drivers and DirectX, and things like
edge-scrolling, which doesn't always work as expected under a virtualised
environment - even if running full-screen. Part of the problem is that
modern monitors and resolutions are FAR higher than old games ever expected
to see. I don't (yet) have a good solution for this.

Just to be aware, I've no idea of the licensing restrictions (if any) of
running Windows in a virtualised or containerised environment. Again,
hopefully others can shed some light.

TWO:
I use WinXP, so I'll defer to the advice of others on which version of
Windows you should run.

THREE:
Like you, I've used Truecrypt to have encrypted data accessible to both
operating system - if the data has to be read raw. Since my usage was read
heavy with occasional writes this worked well for me. For Linux I use LUKS
disk encryption, but this is not readable in raw form by Windows (AFAIK.)
Nowadays I mostly have data on a LUKS partition and share it over the
network (or virtualised network) using sshfs. For Windows you can probably
do something similar by sharing it using Samba/SMB. This means the data at
rest is encrypted and accessible from the Linux instance - and accessible
as a network share from within a Windows VM. Note that this is NOT useful
if you're talking about a removable drive that you want to mount on other
Windows machines - in which case Truecrypt is the best product I've come
across thus far.

Hope the above helps.

Best regards,
-->Gar




2016-01-06 0:54 GMT+00:00 Jason Horan <[email protected]>:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm looking to tap into the combined wisdom of the group.  I've had a
> dual-boot PC for many years, running both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 15.04. For
> Christmas my wife (and brother-in-law) got me a bespoke PC which he put
> together. The specs are as follows:
> *CPU* Core i5-4460 3.2GHz (6MB cache)
> *RAM* 16GB DDR3
> *HD1* SSD 250GB
> *HD2* 3TB SATA 3Gb/s
> *Graphics* GeForce GTX 750 (2GB DDR5)
> *Motherboard* ASRock H97 Anniversary, ATX, (UEFI)
>
> I plan to have my OSs on HD1, the SSD, and keep the other drive for data.
> I'll be running Ubuntu but I also need to have Windows installed, for a few
> legacy applications. Because the machine is custom-built it doesn't come
> with any pre-installed OS. My old dual-boot system worked fine, but it was
> a pain having to reboot to change from one to the other. Which leads to my
> questions:-
>
> *ONE:*
> Dual-boot or just boot into Ubuntu and run Windows as a virtual machine?
> What are the pros or cons for each option and how much would they actually
> matter?
>
> *TWO:*
> Which version of Windows to use? Windows 10 or Windows 7? Again, what is
> the rationale behind the advice.
>
> *THREE:*
> In my old dual-boot system I'd a data partition which I had encrypted with
> TrueCrypt and that mounted on boot, after the password, in both OSs. I will
> need to have an encrypted partition again. Does this influence your advice
> for question one? Also, what strategy for encrypting a partition would you
> use at this stage? I will need access to this encrypted data partition from
> both the Linux and Windows environments.
>
> Many thanks for the advice, and Happy New Year!!!
>
>
> Jason
>
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> Irish Linux Users Group
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>



-- 
Gareth 'bigbro' Eason

-- 
Irish Linux Users Group
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