by September 2024
Oh the glorious irony after all those years… well, I have a dual-boot setup on my PC with Fedora Linux and Windows 11. I did this to give myself the option to choose depending on what I needed to do. Currently I find myself using Fedora about 90% of the time because it can do almost everything and is significantly faster and, most importantly, nowhere near as intrusive and bloataceous as Windows 11. There are two things that Windows does better at the moment:
- Scanning: my slightly elderly printer/scanner from Canon has software that only works fully under Windows particularly to have all options with the scanner.
- Garmin software in order to update navigation devices, watches, cameras etc
Everything else runs better and faster in Fedora. Thus the current plan is to see whether I can set up a virtual machine with Windows under Linux and get scanning and Garmin software to run properly and thus maybe be able to remove Windows as a primary operating system from my PC.
First steps:
I haven’t yet ever set up a virtual machine so my first step was to do a test run. Fedora comes with the Boxes software built in which is a fairly simple and easy way to install a virtual machine. I decided to start with this.
Before you get started it is worth going downstairs into BIOS and just making sure that virtualisation is enabled in the CPU settings. This may be called KVM, in my BIOS it is called SVM and needs to be active to allow virtualisation to work.
My first step to to setup a bared-down Gnome OS nightly using half of my available RAM and 50GB drive space which I have called “Gnaked Gnome Gnightly”. This is now up and running and all was smooth and easy. The next step here is to give it access to USB ports so that it can communicate with other devices which are plugged into USB.
Second steps:
Now to give Windows a go. First thing was to read around in the internet and to see how other people have done this. As could be expected, Windows apparently needs a bit of tweaking to get it to work 🙂 . Here a few examples:
to be continued as things progress….
