I decided, for no good reason at all to switch my VM management from virtualbox, which has served me very well over the years, to Qemu/KVM & Virt-Manager. I have resisted switching for a long time, mainly because I am familiar with virtualbox, having used it for years even when windows was my daily driver and I was experimenting with linux. Every time I wanted to spin up a VM I didn’t want to additionally invent in learning a new tool. So last night I had nothing to do as I waited for some banana bread to come out of the oven (what else do you do with banana’s that no one will touch) everyone one was a sleep and thought I’d give it a spin.
So far I am pretty impressed. I installed EOS with KDE Wayland without any issues after adjusting the video settings. Installed very quickly and seems to work very nice. I am now installing Win11, and it so seems to be installing very well (installing as I write this), again after adjusting the video settings, and this time adding TPM.
Every time I install Windows I am amazed at how long it takes compared to installing a prebuilt Linux distro. Not sure why it takes so long, but it just makes me think it’s just added complexity. Don’t get me wrong I totally get Linux installs much fewer services and everything out of the box and Windows is more “full featured” and caters to a different audience, but I do wonder why it has to reboot several times during the install. Not trying to bash Windows, it has it’s place and in my case in a VM, it just makes me think is all.
If Windows works as well as EOS does in QEMU I will likely remove virtualbox and stick with this for me VM needs. At least for now until something else pops up that changes my mind.
Having worked in Windows deployment for years, I’m convinced the main slow-down is decompression of the ‘install.wim’ image to the target drive, and all the pauses for user input during the ‘OOBE’ (out of box experience) phase. All of the OOBE delays can be streamlined by inserting an autounattend.xml file on the Win .iso. One of my favorite websites to create this .xml file is here.
One of the side benefits of using virtualbox is that it can emulate a “SLIC” bios, which allows you to inject an OEM license key with matching bios file to emulate a Dell/HP/etc. system and associated OEM license key. I’m not sure QEMU can do that.
But yeah…Windows installs suck.
Quick update, getting windows up and functional is a bit more work than on virtualbox. The big hurtle is getting the guest services installed took quite a bit of googling to find some prebuild signed drivers. Also getting the shared drive connected is more work on windows as it involves creating a specific service to connect to virtiofs. On EOS all I had to do was edit fstab with the appropriate line. Either way It seems to be working ok, Will give it a go over the next few days and see if I can remove my virtualbox install and images
I realise that W7 used a “SLIC” bios, whereas W10 uses embedded keys.
I have a W11-compatible Lenovo E15 laptop which was running W10, but is currently running EndeavourOS on its own (not dual-boot).
If I install VirtualBox in EndeavourOS and then install W10 in Vbox, will my W10 use the OEM license key (on the motherboard, and also written down) and be automatically activated?
Basically, will my W10 installation be capable of activation either directly from the motherboard or by me entering the written-down OEM key?
I don’t believe it will activate directly from the MB, but if you have the activation key written down you should be able to use it to activate your new windows install within your vm. Not sure if you will have to go to your MS account and deactivate the old version first or not, but give it a try
I did some more research in the interim and came up with the following:
At the risk of answering my own question (very bad form), I believe that it is allowed by the Microsoft licensing rules as long as only one instance is used.