[conspire] VirtualBox

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> >Grey-market product, you see. 
> 
> If the install media is not routinely supplied with computers,
> there won't be disks for the grey-market. 
> 
> Good for MicroSoft, not so good for the rest of us.

I'm not sure you're saying (but see footnote at bottom about grogginess)
grey-market installation media are good or bad -- but FWIW I really
wasn't saying it was one or the other.  They're a market reality, and
all I was saying about them is that they are a questionable substitute
for real retail copies.

And what I alleged about bundled OSes -- the stance I've maintained for
many decades -- is that if you lack the means to reinstall your OS, you 
don't properly own it.  And, IMO, that is a big problem.  Therefore, I
recommend that if you intend to rely on a bundled OS, you need to
acquire good general-purpose installation media (and whatever activation
codes or whatnot in fashion this decade) one way or the other.  Some
people feel that _some_ grey-market copies of MS-Windows have qualified
as good general-purpose installation media.  Some edition on grey-market
media have infamously proven to be _not_ general-purpose.  (And
'recovery' CDs suck to the degree that they're only just better than
losing everything.)

Therefore, the most-satisfactory general solution is a full retail copy
of the OS.  I personally would want to budget to buy one -- or admit
that I wasn't serious about actually owning a copy of the OS, such that
I could properly reinstall it if necessary.  _Or_, the third alternative
I adopted in the early 1990s, just stop using that stuff entirely.

It always surprises me when I get pushback (and I don't mean necessarily
from you, Paul, but it does happen) on the 'You don't really own a copy
of an operating system unless you have the means to flexibly reinstall
it at will' position.  It strikes me as common sense, and goes along
with 'you don't own your applications unless you have the means to
flexibly reinstall them at will' and 'you don't really own your data
files unless you have the means to flexibly restore them from backup at
will.'  I can only guess that people have gotten so beaten down by an
increasingly sucky set of compromises forced on them by OEM bundling
agreements and the OS vendor that they start thinking 'Hey, this must be
OK because we've been making do with this for many years.'  

My point is:  No, it's really not OK, and shouldn't be deemed acceptable
in any way.  Never was, never will be.

Of course, some of us sidestep the issue by doing our computing on open
source.  Others don't, certainly have reasons, and Sucks To Be Them.[tm]



> Ah, ah, because I had always used dual-boot to get to Windows and
> hadn't really needed to consider the alternatives until now.

Glad you're considering it.  In all honesty, it's only fair to warn you
that I haven't tried (and so have not tested) the alternative I outlined
because I haven't needed it.  However, the nice thing is that you can
try it experimentally _without_ any real risk, e.g.:


1.  Use a non-destructive partition resizer to shrink your install
MS-Window OS's NTFS partition.

2.  Use the VMware P2V utility to make an image.  Copy it off to a
detachable (and reasonably big) USB-connected hard drive.

3.  Use the same non-destructive partition resizer to make the installed
MS-Windows preload take up the entire disk again.  (If this seems silly,
hold that thought.  The plan will now be made clear.)

4.  Copy back onto your native NTFS filesystem (the Windows preload) the
big .vmdk file.  (It'll certainly be hundreds of megs, or about however
big you were able to shrink the NTFS partition to, in step #1.  Not that
my intuition about the minimum size of MS-Windows is probably way out of
date.)

5.  Install VirtualBox for Windows onto Windows.  Launch it.  Configure
it to be able to boot the .vmdk file as a guest OS.  Boot up the virtual
machine, and observe the awful splendour of MS-Windows running itself in
an emulated computer under itself.

The only part of the above steps with even the tiniest risk is the
non-destructive partition resizer, and gods know people seem to use
those with wild abandon, these days.  On the (small) minus side, it's
probably quite a bit of schlepping around of bits, and so will take a
while.



The above exercise will prove (test) the technique.  _Now_, having done
so, and making sure you still kept the .vmdk file on your external
drive, you can blow away the laptop's entire set of hard disk contents,
install _your_ choice of host OS, install VirtualBox for the host OS,
and then run goest-OS MS-Windows in a VM using the .vmdk file.

The off-system .vmdk file copy can also then serve as your means of
recovery in case of, say, security compromise, hard disk failure, theft
of laptop, and so on.  (Note:  Unlike Linux, Windows unfortunately
installs in a manner that is heavily dependent on the then-present
hardware components.  Therefore, a disk image of a successful
installation cannot in general be moved to different hardware.  However,
part of the beauty of a virtualised image is that VM layer abstracts the
guest OS from the specific physical hardware.)

Inherent in VM technology, you can also, if you wish, checkpoint any
future state of the .vmdk file as your new standard image stored on
backup media in case needed -- and there are many other interesting
tricks you can use.  Read up on the possibilities; they're fascinating.

The .vmdk file is VMware's native on-disk storage format where it puts
installed guest OSes, and that functions as a simulated hard disk for
the guest OS.  Somehow, and I really don't know details, Oracle
VirtualBox purportedly can fully understand and use .vmdk images.  Maybe
it converts them to its own native format.  I'm not really clear on that
point.  You can try it and tell us what you discover, if so moved.

VMware was an remains very important to virtualisation because it was
the first company to do it well.  My firm Linuxcare helped the fledgling
company make its presentation at the first LWCE in San Jose.  VMware,
Inc.'s proprietary virtualisation engine and ancillary tools were
already very impressive.  The astonishing thing is that it's remained
relevant and influential even while competitors including Xen (open
source), VirtualBox (open source except some optional add-ons), and KVM
w/qemu-kvm (open source) have tried to cannibalise its business model.


> One of the slogans of the Maker Faire is, "If you can't take it apart,
> you don't own it."

Right on, bro'.

> Meanwhile, I found the following link which indicates that the  Debian
> network install image does support UEFI and dual boot. Come to think
> of it, when I installed Jessie, I downloaded the image for CD 1, which
> was not a live CD.

Yes.  You might want to also look into Debian Live, which yet again
another separate thing.

Personally, I've always been fond of an off-brand Debian installer, a
live-CD distro called aptosid (original name 'sidux') that is a very
close, compatible derivative of Debian 'sid' = unstable branch -- thus
the name and series of related lame 'sid' puns.  For people wanting to
run Debian unstable or testing, in my experience aptosid is an excellent
point of departure.  

The fact that it's not technical a Debian installer doesn't signify.
Once you stop worrying about labels, you realise that if it acts like a
Debian installer, and produces what is recognisably a Debian system,
then in a functional sense it's a Debian installer.

Update:  I just noticed DistroWatch now marks aptosid as 'dormant':
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=aptosid
'Dormant' often can mean 'still recent enough to like and use', depending.
However, I note that aptosid's 2011 schism distro (fork) siduction is
marked as status = 'Active', which is good:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=siduction

So, look into siduction first, if interested.  Note siduction's eight DE
flavours, each of which is a live-CD ISO.  (Allegedly, the siduction
devs split off from aptosid because of a perceived insufficient interest
in desktop Linux.  There were also, of course, personality and
communication issues.)  Like aptosid, siduction is functionally a Debian
unstable/testing installer, if you stare at it sideways and ignore the
branding.  If it follows aptosid's lead (as I'd expect), it's totally
compatible by policy.

Aptosid promised quarterly releases, kept that
schedule up for quite a few years, then started missing quarters and
hitting roughly annual release targets.  Seems like this ground to a
(temporary? hard to say) halt in 2013.

aptosid.com Web site is offline - bad sign.  Sic transit gloria distro.


(Hoping I'm still coherent, as the household is getting over a week with
2016's winter influenza -- mitigated by ye olde annual flu vaccine.
'Science, bitches!'  I will make a judgement call later this week about
whether CABAL should be held, this Saturday.  Present signs are
excellent, at a distance of 4.75 days.)