Hi,
I’m considering transitioning completely to Linux for my main workstation. However, due to the nature of my work I rely extensively on a few Autodesk products (namely AutoCAD, Revit) as well as Ms OneDrive to coordinate with clients. I did some research and these applications are not available natively and can’t run through Wine. So I was thinking setting up a virtual machine with a windows image in order to run these two programs. They don’t need extensive GPU. I was wondering if there are any obstacles / issues I should be aware if I chose to go this route? Thanks!
Be careful with some of this expensive commercial crap. I use a piece of software which does not work if it even remotely thinks it is in a virtual environment due to an overzealous license manager.
It will be banished on a single purpose windows laptop, so I can finally reinstall the desk machine with Linux single boot.
Thanks. I’m debating between using a second tower with a KVM switch adjacent. Seems less hassle but I’d prefer to have a vm and have everything locally.
Should be fine if autodesk doesn’t do the same crap as solidworks, which won’t allow installing on a vm with some licenses, in my case student license
Ugh. I decided to use an old desktop and use remote desktop. It’s not ideal but might be more functional then virtualization
That’s what I did too, just controlled my windows laptop with anydesk. I can’t plug it into my monitor and staring at a laptop screen destroys my neck, so that was the next best thing…until anydesk suddenly became shit and started crashing, image became too blurry to see any text, huge latency.
Now, I am not intimately familiar with Autodesk products, but I have this extensively with other Windows only software and the VM option has worked great. Some VR platforms will even run the Windows part in the background and let you run your application right on your Linux desktop like any other Linux app.
Some VR platforms will even run the Windows part in the background and let you run your application right on your Linux desktop like any other Linux app.
Which program does this?
I think they are talking about “seamless” mode, not sure which virtual machine applications do this but it does exist e.g. this is VirtualBox’s description of the feature
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/topics/guestadditions.html#seamlesswindows
do this at my job right now too.
The biggest obstacle is understanding your hardware limitations. A windows VM needs a lot of resources.
Basically, for windows 11 you are going to want to give the VM a minimum of 4 CPU threads (6 is better), 8 GB of RAM (16 is better), and at least 128 GB of storage.
If your PC has the resources to spare you can host windows as a guest os pretty well without too much lag.
You are going to to want to do some research on which vm management application to use depending on your host distro and your personal workflow. Some are easier than others but us proprietary code, some are fully FOSS and well documented but require a bit of tinkering
I personally use KVM, qemu, and virt-manager on arch for my vms. I was even able to emulate a TPM on my older desktop with a package from the AUR.
If you also use an arch based distro and are interested in KVM, qemu, and virt-manager, I can post my docs here.
Fantastic. I have a second internal hdd can i designate that as a partition for this vm? Thanks!
I think there are ways to do that but I didn’t research it.
Here are my docs for whati did to get it working in arch.
Install virt-manager on Arch
install the required pkgs
sudo pacman -Syu --needed virt-manager qemu-desktop libvirt edk2-ovmf dnsmasq vde2 bridge-utils iptables-nft dmidecode libguestfs
update /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf
sudo sed -i 's|#unix_sock_group = "libvirt"|unix_sock_group = "libvirt"|' /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf
sudo sed -i 's|#unix_sock_rw_perms = "0770"|unix_sock_rw_perms = "0770"|' /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf
sdd your user account to libvirt group
sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $(whoami)
newgrp libvirt
start & enable libvirt daemon
sudo systemctl enable libvirtd.service
sudo systemctl start libvirtd.service
sudo systemctl status libvirtd.service
run the following
sudo virsh net-autostart default
reboot
run virtual machine manager (virt-manager)
Windows 11
- download latest windows 11 iso https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
- download https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-virtio/virtio-win.iso
sudo pacman -Syu swtpm edk2-ovmf
# Libtpms-based TPM emulator
tpm_path=~/Documents/windows11/
swtpm socket --tpm2 --tpmstate dir="${tpm_path}" --ctrl type=unixio,path="${tpm_path}/swtpm-sock" &
cp -f /usr/share/edk2/x64/OVMF_VARS.4m.fd ~/Documents/windows11/OVMF_VARS.4m.fd
- once the guest os is installed, start the windows vm and inside it download https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-virtio/virtio-win-guest-tools.exe then install everything.
- Turn on auto resize in virt-manager. [view > scale display > Never + Autoresize VM with window]
