Creating a Windows VM Inside Ubuntu

[Petter Adsen]

On Mon, 2 Nov 2015 13:35:06 +0200
Amichai Rotman <amichai at iglu.org.il> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I am a bit stumped:
> 
> A friend of mine just graduated from Graphics Design school. Of
> course, all design schools teach Adobe products only (Photosop,
> InDesing, etc.) - god forbid any Open Source alternatives...
> 
> Putting *that* discussion aside....
> 
> A few days ago he came to me and said "I am sick of this POS
> OS" (referring to Windows  8.1 installed on his super charged Asus
> laptop). "i'd like you to install Ubuntu on my laptop, but I need to
> be able to use Adobe and my PC games on it."
> 
> I tried to install his (legal) Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 by following a
> tutorial, but all the menus were mangled and distorted and I was
> afraid he will encounter problems in the future.
> 
> So I had an idea of installing his Windows as a Headless VM so he can
> run it only when he needs to work on Adobe or play the games that
> cannot be installed on Ubuntu. I need your advice:

What exactly do you mean by "headless VM"? Just start the VM when he
needs it, so it doesn't take up resources by running in the background
all the time.

> How to do it as painless as possible?

Virtual Machine Manager. The package is called 'virt-manager', and you
install it with 'sudo apt-get install virt-manager'. It is a quite nice
GUI frontend for libvirt.

> Should I use KVM or Virtualbox?

virt-manager can use KVM or Xen, I would recommend KVM. Setting up a
Windows VM with virt-manager is quite straightforward, Fedora has a
quite nice guide here:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Virtualization_Administration_Guide/chap-Virtualization_Administration_Guide-Managing_guests_with_the_Virtual_Machine_Manager_virt_manager.html

Petter

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