You can run Windows 10 Home virtual machine in Cubbli Linux laptops which have builtin Windows 10 Home OEM license available (probably most of them). However, the following points apply:
- The VM has Windows 10 1903 build and Office 365 pro plus installation available and nothing else. You need to install everything else yourself.
- The Windows image download is 12 gigabytes in size (even when compressed). You need a lot of time or a fast Internet connection to download it.
- There is no University of Helsinki customization.
- The first thing you need to create when the VM starts are user accounts. Using the same user account name as your AD user account might help with some things.
- ... or you can use your MS online user account. University of Helsinki AD user accounts do not work for this (yet).
- If you want to create a local offline Windows 10 account, start the Windows 10 VM first without network. Windows 10 installer allows offline account creation only when Internet is not available.
- You are free to create administrator and regular user accounts in the VM.
- You can delete the VM and reinstall it from scratch, as long as you are running only one instance at a time. That is what the license permits.
- The VM can't be transferred to another device (without reactivation) since the activation is tied to the physical device OEM license.
- There is no easy and good way to share files between Windows host and Linux (yet). USB storage stick, OneDrive and Dropbox are probably easiest solutions.
- If you are a staff member, you can request an AD Windows installation instead.
- AD Windows usage instructions apply to these OEM Windows installation too.
Installation
You can skip this step, if you already have cubbli-kvm package installed and you belong to the libvirt group.
You need sudo rights to install the required KVM hypervisor. With sudo rights run the following commands to install Qemu+KVM hypervisor and to give your user account access to the installed hypervisor.
$ sudo apt -y install cubbli-kvm
$ sudo addgroup $USER libvirt
When succesful the result should look like this:
$ sudo apt -y install cubbli-kvm
[sudo] password for jjaakkol:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
cubbli-kvm
1 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.
Need to get 1,464 B of archives.
After this operation, 1,024 B of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://cubbli.cs.helsinki.fi/cubbli bionic/main amd64 cubbli-kvm all 18.04.2-2 [1,464 B]
Fetched 1,464 B in 0s (108 kB/s)
(Reading database ... 1069307 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../cubbli-kvm_18.04.2-2_all.deb ...
Unpacking cubbli-kvm (18.04.2-2) over (18.04.1-1) ...
Setting up cubbli-kvm (18.04.2-2) ...
$ sudo addgroup $USER libvirt
The user `jjaakkol' is already a member of `libvirt'.
You need to restart your machine to get access to the libvirt group (Yes, the group can be accessed without a restart. This is left as an exercise). After the restart run the script i-want-windows-10:
luser@lx9-fuxi987$ i-want-windows10
This script installs a Windows 10 OEM QEMU+KVM virtual machine to your host.
Downloading Windows 10 image.
win10-oem-compressed. 100%[=========================>] 11.89G 22.7MB/s in 10m 18s
Creating virtual machine pool directory in /home/libvirt-home.
Domain win10-oem defined from /home/libvirt-home/win10-oem.xml
Installation finished.
No you can start your VM with virt-manager.
luser@lx9-fuxi987$
Running Windows 10 for the first time.
Now launch virt-manager
(Virtual Machine Manager) and select your new Windows 10 VM called win10-oem
. Click the play button to start the VM. The first launch will take some time.
Please wait. | Getting ready... | Just a moment |
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Then you need to answer various Windows 10 dialogues. This too will take some time.
Locale and keyboard selection. | You need to accept the Windows 10 license. |
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Next you need to create an user account. You can use MS online user accounts or you can create a local user account. You can create a local user account without a password, since this is a virtual machine and only accessible from the host Linux machine.
Sign in with MS online account (if you have one) or create an offline account. | Offline account creation. Remember, offline account creation is only available if Win 10 can't access the Internet. | You can create an account with empty password, since this is a virtual machine. |
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After answering yet more questions about MS online tracking (always answering no is a safe choice):
If you thought you were done waiting... | Finally! |
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When the installation is finished check that Windows 10 activation succeeded.
Hit Windows key and type activation. Select activation settings. | Windows should be automatically activated with a digital license. |
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If activation was a success install Windows updates next.
Hit windows key and type updates. Download updates. | A restart is required after updates are installed. | This probably looks familiar. |
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Congratulations! You are done. If you want to use Office apps, you need to sign on with an online user account. Your user@ad.helsinki.fi
account will work for this. More instructions about using Windows VMs with Virtual Machine Manager will be available later.
Default virtual hardware.
- Two CPU cores are available to the virtual machine. If your host machine has more cores, you can add them to the VM using
virt-manager
. Remember that Windows 10 home can only use virtual CPU cores, not virtual CPU sockets, since Windows 10 home only sees the 1st CPU of the machine. - The VM has 4G memory. Again, you are free to add more memory, if your Linux host has memory available.
- The virtual C: disk has only 50G size. Again, you can add more disk space to the VM.
- You can redirect USB host devices directly to the VM by selecting Virtual Machine/Redirect USB devices from the
virt-manager
menu.
Exporting laptops builtin USB web cam to Windows: