Actually, no you don’t.
I am familiar enough with most of the virtual machine platforms to know that you can assign a drive or other device directly to the vm for use. In VMWare, it’s actually pretty easy in the setup. Virtualbox has something similar. Also, you can even dedicate a device directly to the vm, especially if it’s on a USB port. At that point, the VM has exclusive control of the device in question. Also, as for direct filesystem access, this can be easily achieved using an external drive for the filesystem you wish to use (including but not limited to having it as bootable media, setting up the filesystem type and various other features. Honestly, though, if you want, you can backup your windows machine, install linux, and then use a VM to host windows. That is what I did from late 2004 on, using an older AMD X2 processor, plenty of internal drives and even setting up a virtual bridge. I had windows 2k on one instance, openBSD on another (as the system firewall and even assigned an external interface to it directly). When I got done, I had a machine with a linux host, 5 virtual machines, and lots of available processing power for all that I needed. I even set up an NFS volume, and also a PXE boot server. Certainly made life a bit more convenient with evrrything on a single machine (hardware) and 5 or 6 remote machines in the house, all being PXE booted. I haven’t really done much of this in the last half decade, but it shouldn’t be all that hard to get back into it. My only difficulty with doing everything like this at the time was some accessibility issues that required a small bit of sighted assistance to get around certain setup issues.
-Eric
From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Virtual Machine Engineering Dept.
> On May 21, 2024, at 8:02 PM, Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
> wsl won't work. I need to have access to an optical drive. So I need to wait until I can get a dedicATED LINUX BOX.
>
> On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 10:22 PM Eric Oyen via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org <mailto:plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org>> wrote:
> Um,
>
> Given you are on a windows box, wouldn’t it be easier to run VMWare or some other virtual machine platform? I do that here on my OS X system when I need linux (and ORCA screen reader). Sure, macports (the unix and linux like ports software library) can be useful without having to deal with a VM, but X desktops aren’t accessible with the built in screen reader and ORCA is not in the macports library. :( So, even though I am stuck on a 2012 Mac mini (and I don’t have the funds for upgrading), I can still use most of the latest available (and accessible) X desktop items and ORCA from inside the VM (including latest LTS versions of Ubuntu) It also means I don’t need to create a bootcamp partition for the other OS, although that can sometimes be more useful than a VM.
>
> As for windows, too much is hit and miss on that platform accessibility wise for me to use it reliably. Sure, the NVDA screen reader is open source, but doesn’t work with everything and JAWS costs about $100 a year for a license and also doesn’t work with everything. That is basically why I avoid windows unless I have no other choice.
>
> The only issue I have with apple products is that the EFI has no accessibility whatsoever (in fact, none of the available hardware anywhere on the market for computing has accessibility on the EFI). So, if I want to convert my old Mac mini into a dedicated linux machine, I would have to have sighted assistance to do so (a non starter here). And yes, I have even proposed to the EFI consortium the use of BrlTTY in the EFI as an accessibility option (it is, after all, an embedded linux). Yet, I see no response from them at all and I have tried every year since 2010. Guess we blind computer techs don’t mean squat unless we can bring a lot of money to the table. Now, if I knew the full in’s and out’s of how the EFI is installed, configured and compiled, then it wouldn’t be hard to create my own version with a built-in braille and speech interface. That would provide a Fiat Accompli to the industry in general and allow many more like me into the full IT fields without having to demand more reasonable accommodations. Ah well, I have diverged from the original subject a bit, but it is, at least, minimally related to this thread.
>
> Anyway, since windows support for Unix services is a bit proprietary, why not just go with a VM and call it good?
>
> -Eric
> From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Engineering and Development Dept.
>
>
>> On May 21, 2024, at 11:18 AM, Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org <mailto:plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org>> wrote:
>>
>> well, I'm stuck in a world of windows now. but I gots to use linux so I'm doing wsl. How do I get gui to work: I ran apt update/upgrade/xinit but it responds with:
>>
>> _XSERVTansmkdir: Mode....X11-unix should.... 1777
>> _XSERVTransCreateListener: failed...
>> _XSERVTransUNIX...:failed
>> _XSERVTransMakeALL... failed...
>> etc....
>>
>> So could someone help me get x going until I can get a beloved linux box again?
>> --
>> :-)~MIKE~(-:
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> --
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
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