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On 01/01/13 18:20, Neil Winchurst wrote: > Yes, I understand that most modern computers have room for VBox and > can then run eg Window 7 on there. But there is still the problem of > the cost of the Windows licence, isn't there? Apart from not liking > Windows, I begrudge the licence fee, mainly because it is so high and > they are hardly short of money!! > > When I set up my daughter with her own laptop earlier this year I > installed Xubuntu for her and she seems very pleased with it. I bought > a laptop with no OS installed. If I had chosen to I could have had > Windows 7 installed for me at a cost of Â90. How much ???? > > Neil > Ok, to answer Neil and Henry: 1: the license. This is a sticking point to be fair, but if you *must* have a legitimate windows install to do some legitimate work on, you *must* get a licensed version and that costs money, as simple as that. I agree the prices tend to be a bit steep (especially for the Enterprise/Ultimate versions which are the only versions worth using) but short of piracy, which I'm obviously not going to advocate, if you want windows you have to pay for it. The standard, non-discounted price for the OEM version hovers around the Â100 mark - there may be other list members who deal with windows regularly who have suggestions for special deals or offers, if so, please feel free to chip in. It's worth pointing out that Windows 8 is actually slightly cheaper, and much cheaper if you have a valid Win7 license to upgrade from (~Â40). It's also worth pointing out that I'm not much of an expert on consumer level Windows licensing costs - I mostly deal with volume licensing as a sysadmin (where the company bean counters worry about the money, I worry about the admin stuff and couldn't care less about the cost) and personally have access to multiple Technet subscriptions, so have legit access to pretty much any Microsoft product. The good news is that except for Neil, who specifically bought a laptop without a Windows install, you've probably already paid for a Windows license. If your computer has a Microsoft License sticker on it anywhere, then you're good to go. Even if you inherited a second hand computer, blew the Windows install away and proceeded to put Linux on it, that license is still valid and you can grab a Windows installer, put in your license key and reactivate. If you're unlucky, you may end up having to call the dreaded Microsoft Activation Helpline but they've really streamlined that these days and it's pretty painless. 2: the how. Ok, this is going to be long enough that maybe I'll try and write it up as an entry for this LUG revamp if anyone thinks it would be a good idea. I'm not reinventing the wheel though - there are countless howtos and reams of official documentation out there already so at most I'd do a kind of streamlined, bullet point primer on the essentials and list the gotchas that in my experience, a lot of guides and nearly all the official stuff don't mention. Before you even get started on the road to virtualization, you'll need to do some homework first. Firstly, choose your virtualization tool wisely! If you have no prior experience here, it can be confusing, as you have VMWare (Player, Workstation, ESX), VirtualBox, KVM, Xen and a whole bunch of other hypervisors to choose from. I'm going to go ahead and presume, perhaps unwisely, that VirtualBox will be your best choice. It's free, open-source and friendly, unlike *all* of the other options. VMWare workstation is quite nice to use but has serious problems on a Linux host and is expensive - Xen and KVM are both decidedly more heavy duty tools more normally used in enterprise environments. So your first task is to download and install VirtualBox, and familiarise yourself with it a little. Ideally, install a random Linux distribution and a Windows 8 (free) trial as VMs and ensure that you're going to be able to live with VirtualBox from then on. You really need to make sure you can get on with your virtualization tool well before taking the plunge and committing to it, trust me. If all goes well up to this point, you'll be ready for the next steps which are: A: decide if you're going to migrate to a clean VM install, or do a physical to virtual (P2V) conversion of an existing machine B: backup your machine if you're going to do a P2V - a lot can go wrong C: prepare the machine which will be hosting the new virtualized guest D: make sure you have some extra tools, such as sysprep I'll write more as soon as anyone asks for it, especially Henry who expressly asked "how?" Incidentally Henry, what's your current situation on the laptop? Is it dual boot? You're going to have even more work to do if your laptop currently runs Windows and you want to P2V the existing install from bare metal to a VM, replace Windows with Debian as the laptop's main OS, and then move the virtualized Windows system back onto the laptop as a virtual guest. If this is the case, you're in luck, because this is what I specialise in and know the process inside out. The most common virtualization procedures I do are P2V conversions of Windows into VMs that are then run under Linux, frequently back on the same hardware they've just been abstracted from. If you want to get started right away with VirtualBox, specific instructions for installation are here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads Just look for the Debian specific section and follow what they say. Don't forget to install the critical Extension Pack afterwards. Don't even think about using the community edition of VBox available from various distro's mirrors, it's inferior to the official Oracle version (can't believe I just said that... VBox was a Sun project though, which Oracle have just rebadged). Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq