[ubuntu-za] (no subject)

[Charl Wentzel]

Thanks guys!

I got a lot of information and sifted through all of it.  However, there
seems to be one major problem when it comes to making a virtual machine
of an existing Windoze Vista partition... Micro$oft removed bootable
hardware profiles from Vista!

The licencing of Windoze XP and Vista is linked to the hardware you run
it on.  In XP you can create different hardware profiles; one for
physical and one for the virtual machine.  This allows the same licence
to operate on different hardware configurations.  When you boot up you
get a boot menu in which you choose which hardware profile you should
use.  So when you boot it as a the Virtual machine you simply pick the
virual maching profile.

In Vista they removed this functionality.  So as Russell described
you'll have to re-activate Windoze if you go this route as you are
effectively running Vista on a new set of hardware invalidating the
license.

PS: After some research I found that many people have threatened to
switch to alternative operating systems as a result.  Amazing none of
these were people's problems had anything to do with virtual machines!
They were all Widoze users!!

Just another reason why we loved to hate Windoze!  I'm only using
Windoze once every two months so I may as well format the partition and
download some more nifty Linux programs ;-)

Thanks for the help anyway!
Charl

-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Cloran <russell at rucus.net>
Reply-To: Ubuntu South African Local Community
<ubuntu-za at lists.ubuntu.com>
To: Ubuntu South African Local Community <ubuntu-za at lists.ubuntu.com>
Subject: Re: [ubuntu-za] (no subject)
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:21:40 +0200

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Charl Wentzel
<charl.wentzel at vodamail.co.za> wrote:
> I'm not familiar with virtualisation software in Linux.  I know that on
> a machine setup for dual booting a Windows and a Linux partition; you
> can boot the Linux partition in Windows as a virtual machine using
> VMware.

For what it's worth, I ran into problems with booting Vista using
Virtualbox because Vista only likes to be run on one set of hardware
-- as soon as you change the hardware configuration you need to
relicense or something along those lines. Virtualisation will present
a different set of hardware to booting natively, so if you want to
switch between the virtual hardware and booting natively it's a pain.
I've heard that there are ways around this, though I have no idea what
they are.

I'd suggest Virtualbox as a desktop virtualisation tool on Linux.

Russell