[Discuss] Ubuntu Install Question

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

The other problem with doing it that way is that the Windows license
usually doesn't cover it. The licenses that come with computers
(either Home or Pro) and the System Builder licenses that some stores
sell only authorize you to run it on one computer on bare metal. To
run Windows under a hypervisor (either under another OS or under
Windows itself) you either need a Windows Enterprise license (only
sold to volume buyers) or a full retail copy of Windows. (The only
exception was the Virtual XP mode that came with Windows 7
Professional; that let you run a single virtual copy of XP on Windows.
And you lose the ability to do that if you upgrade the system to
Windows 8 or 10.) here is no way to upgrade that license that came
with the computer to one that allows hypervisor installation; you have
to buy a new copy at full price.

It's an unreasonable restriction on Microsoft's part. A Windows
license should allow you to run any number of virtualized copies of
Windows on that machine under any host OS, so long as they are not
used to run servers for the internet or for enterprise operations.
That would prohibit the use cases that they're really trying to block
(using workstation copies of Windows in place of the more expensive
server editions) while allowing use by developers, to sandbox a
possibly risky application, or to run Windows under another host OS.

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 2:33 PM grg <grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 07, 2019 at 06:05:36PM -0500, Rich Pieri wrote:
> > Running your Ubuntu in Hyper-V is also an option to consider. Not only
> > do most Linux distros run just fine in Hyper-V, installing Ubuntu
> > 18.04.1 LTS in Hyper-V is formally supported.
>
> How about the opposite?  I'm going to be receiving a windows laptop which I
> want to convert to linux, but I feel it's prudent to retain the ability to
> run the factory windows(*) that's already on there.  I'd like to run that
> windows inside virtualbox on linux (rather than just dual-booting).
>
> I figure I could either shrink the windows partition and then have virtualbox
> just run windows from it, or I could move the windows partition contents
> into a .vdi file in the laptop's One Filesystem to Rule Them All.(**)
>
> Though I've heard it said that consumer-grade Windows won't be happy to
> suddenly find itself running inside a vm, presumably some form of license
> enforcement - I'm not sure if it's detecting its enclosing vm directly, or
> if it's unhappy to be running from a different disk, or if people were
> running it elsewhere and it sees the cpu has changed.
>
> Any advice on whether to keep a windows partition or move to an image file?
> Any particularly good (or bad) ways of going about this conversion?
>
> Thanks!
> --grg
>
>
> (*) Windows because occasionally the need to run windows-only stuff pops up,
> factory because that tends to work best with a laptop's specific devices
> (even though I expect virtualbox will get in the way of some of that..)
>
> (**) Since you mentioned them, I'm looking at zfs or btrfs, though I'm not
> sure this affects much the main question here.
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