Linux Host with Windows (8, 8.1) Guest – Tales of woe and triumph – #1 Setting the scene

Setting the scene

A new laptop arrived for my daily hacking.   This is a *large* dell with i7 8-core / 8Gb and massive 1920 width screen supplemented by a Nvidia 2Gb mobile GPU (a story in itself since it is dual intel/nvidia and a voyage into bumblebee, optimus and prium ensued.

Being a Dell this came primed with Window 8 – I could not make head nor tail of this until I installed classic shell (thanks guys) which made it almost usable.  As this was pre-installed I loaded all my required software (mucho), configured it and then proceeded to fight multiple blue screens, corruption and restore.  I even tried using Ubunutu as guests on M$ hyper-V.   Well it was all worth a try wasn’t it (UEFI boot will be the subject of another post).

So, after ruining a good few evenings I decided to give up and do it properly. This meant Ubuntu 13.10 host with Windows guest and virtual network with all data stored on a truecrypt logical volume on the host shared on samba.    I decided to use lvm and establish a logical partition for the windows system to use; this proved useful later as a snapshot of the windows sub-partitions can be done using kpartx -a <logical lvm> then ntfsclone on the visible sub-partition (don’t get me started on fsarchiver and ntfs….).

This has now been running for some months, I regularly take a snapshot of the virtual “just in case” and all works hunky dory (although 13.04 to 13.10 killed USB hot swap – an apparmor and libvirt issues solvable) and sound issues (mainly though I use a usb headset passed to the guest for dragon naturally speaking).

More details to follow on how do do al this without the rabbit holes and gotcha’s I enjoyed along the way …

Code:

#!/bin/bash
echo "echo"

Disclaimer: This code is from a hardware engineer turned hacker, it most likely aint pretty, it most likely can be done better but …. it works.