Another one bites the dust - Winblows that is.

[oshunluvr]

Well, sort of.

I have to use Office365 for work and Wine just won't cut it. But I've gotten damn tired of my 5 year-old Dell M6800 and all the issues Windows 7 Pro has - like a power driver "updated" so that now every couple of hours it BSOD's.

So yesterday, I pulled out an unused Samsung 850 EVO SSD 128GB from my supplies and replaced the slow noisy HD in the laptop. Then I installed Kubuntu 18.04 to a 16GB btrfs file system/partition and made a second partition of 110GB in EXT4 to host my virtual machines. I use Linux VMs along with Windows for my work and all my data files are stored on a portable drive. If I run out of room, the laptop also has a mSATA slot so I could add a second drive, or just upgrade the small one as prices fall.

So now I have a fresh Kubuntu 18.04 install, a Windows 10 VM (for office work), one each Centos3 and Windows7 VM (to support old installations) and one each Windows10 and Centos6.7 VMs (to support new installations). The laptop is running solidly, boots in a few seconds instead of the lengthy Windows drawn out startup, and it's much cooler. In fact, the fans is only noticable during boot up. I haven't heard it since then- with Windows it cycled on and off every 10 minutes or so.

Once I get a few configuration bugs worked out, it will be the envy of my co-workers.

The only question I have is why didn't I do this two years ago?



NOTE THE WALLPAPER!

[jglen490]

Because life is complex - and sometimes needlessly so

[GreyGeek]

Another one bites the dust - Winblows that is.

Curious: did your Win10 vendor preconfigure it to look & feel like Win7 ?

[oshunluvr]

No, I've configured everything myself and left the Win10 menu system. It's stupid but I uninstalled most of the cruft already. I only launch it to use Word and Excel and Outlook. The "Tech Support" version of Win10 I use is a whole different animal. It's configured as a test bed and has a state called "session 0" for some hi-tech hijinks. It's kept off-line and only has one job - to connect to a Linux file server that runs postgres and a very specific piece of software not available to the public. We've basically virtualized an entire networked simulation system that runs on 22 PC's in it's native state. With VMs and some power behind it, I can virtualize any of the sub-components of the system and troubleshoot interactions and test configuration modifications.

Despite my campaigning to re-host the entire system with Linux, they went with stripped-and-locked down Win10. It's so modified that it doesn't even require efi! All the actual functionality comes from the VMs - which when deployed in the field run full screen so the underlying host OS is masked almost all the time. In another year or two if I end up where I think I may - in a position of influence and authority - I'm going to re-host the VMs using Linux and compare performance to our current setup. Acutally, the way it is now isn't all that bad. All the underlying windows problems are throttled and the use of VM means snapshots and appliance import/export are easy. All our deployed systems are imaged so a service call is usually just mailing a hard drive for replacement.

[GreyGeek]

After I installed my SuSE 6.3 desktop and server systems at work I was asked to recover a Kodak Unix server that had too many abends and refused to boot any more. No one knew how to interact with Unix and the chief tech brought the HD to me. I plugged it into server and used dd to create an image of the 1 GB disk. Out of 15K jpgs of documents mailed by tax payers and such to the department I was able to recover all but a dozen or so.

Later I was asked to create a bulletin board to replace the Wildcat 4.5 running on a Win95, which kept crashing at nights and weekends and the tech people were getting tired of coming in to work on their own time to reboot the server. I created three python scripts running two phones on a KDE desktop with two 1GB HDs. It ran for 18 months on a work station they were going to dump without a single failure. Then they outsourced it. During that 18 months they sent the tech guys to RH's Linux admin classes and all came back with A+ certificates (IIRC). We had about 30 servers running NetWare in the server room and as they died they were replaced with servers running RH. About half of the server had been replaced when the current crop of politicians running Revenue were voted out of office and the Governor who was elected promised to make Revenue "more efficient". How? The Tax Commissioner he appointed brought with him an assistant tax commissioner (two replacing one) who could only use Windows and Excel. She dumped 10,000 Lotus Notes licenses (out of 13K state employees) and purchased 13,000 new licenses for a bunch of WIndows software. We became a Windows only shop. (I continued to use my Linux workstation to develop software until the day I retired, 10 years ago). The LAN speed, which had more than doubled with Linux became half as fast as the old NetWare network. With Linux workstation file managers got instant displays of folder contents. With Windows there were long delays as the list of files populated Windows explorer. Over all, work efficiency was cut in half and the increase in MS license fees costs several million. This for a state which was, at the time, 750 Million in the hole. Then the big discussion over which database to replace Visual FoxPro 6 with. I recommended PostgreSQL. It was free and there were free and pay-for support groups on the Web. They went with Oracle because part of the purchase price included support. It turned out that Oracle support was so slow that the db folks asked their questions at the free web site, where other oracle admins were hanging out as well, and got good replies within minutes or hours. Hours or days is what Oracle took. PostgreSQL remained free and Ellison kept jacking the price of his db up and up. I don't know what the initial price was but there was weeping and wailing and nashing of teeth when Oracle went to a per CPU per server license fee. The crying became worse when Oracle went to the per core per server license fee. But, I haven't heard about that place in several years so I don't know what new ways Ellison has concocted to increase his personal revenue. He always is in need of more fighter jets and pacific islands.

[claydoh]

Our workstations at my day job are extremely striped down Win 7s using Vmware and thin clients. Think Windows 98 look. They run better over the network than the PCs they replaced, I imagine their virtual hardware is better than the physical ones.

A question about Win 10 licenses and virtual machines: I have Windows 10 Pro on both my new laptop and my old PC. How does running that OS in a VM work work with the licenses, or rather, the activation? Or do you have a separate license for the VM install? I hear that running a physical of Win 10 under a virtual machine messes with activation.

[oshunluvr]

Windows 10 does not require activation to install and use it (it may however be a violation of their license). They've also removed the constant "genuine windows" check or whatever it was as well. Instead, it has some features disabled until you license it. It appears MS has relaxed their grip a bit, maybe because they were choking the consumers!

There is specific mention in the license referring to "...installing to any device, physical or virtual..." which they follow with stating that "...one installation per device per license." That, plus some other mention of VMs is very clear to me that a VM is a device and you're allowed to install to it as long as you have a separate license for each virtual machine.The installation went swimmingly and starts up almost as quick as Linux.

In my case, the VMs used for support are part of a large corporate license pool. My VM for office stuff is licensed individually. I think the "messes with activation" part is if you mess about with the virtual hardware after activating it. It detects a hardware change and assumes you have "moved" the software to a new device. I think the key is to configure your Windows VM before activation and then don't mess with it. I wonder if upgrades to the VirtualBox would trigger the same event? I also went through a lot of uninstalls of stuff I didn't need like XBox integration, etc. I even installed Office365 without a hitch.

Anyway, I'm firm that I am "legal" and can even transport the VM to another machine as long as I don't replicate it for secondary use - backups are allowed.

[claydoh]

Thanks for that.
I don't see me buying an actual license as my PC and laptop have those already, and are installed already, gathering dust as they are only using disk space on the (very) off chance I need Windows for something or a potential job requires it. If the latter occurs I'll probably splurge on a license unless there is a no-VM requirement.

Sent from my LG-H931 using Tapatalk

[GreyGeek]

Did your corporate Win10 have a Win7 look & feel after it was installed, like the two I installed FB and Libreoffice on a week ago?

I'm fortunate. My personal & professional need for Windows disappeared 10 years ago after I retired. The ONLY program I run that requires Windows is the PLC dev tool that I used to computerize the tractor, and it runs fine under WINE.

[oshunluvr]

GG; no it's bone stock menu. We don't really use it so it didn't matter. In the field, each install only runs one application an does so at bootup - so it's literally power-on, do it's thing, power off. Even power up and down are done remotely. The PCs are designed to not be touched unless something breaks.

[GreyGeek]

Another one bites the dust - Winblows that is.

“Turnkey System”.

Been there, done that, easy to do using Linux as well. Just have bashrc call the ELF executable or rename your executable bashrc.