Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Why contains in nonfree that's not ethical?

[Adam Bolte]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 07:31:32PM -0600, Michael Siepmann wrote:
> What about running Windows as a virtual machine in VirtualBox on
> GNU/Linux?  That's what I'm doing currently.  I'd appreciate any
> insights or advice about the pros and cons of that approach.

I think that's fine, however VirtualBox will encourage you to install
proprietary modules for USB 2.0 and other virtual hardware, so you
have to be careful. It also requires recompiling a kernel module every
time you do perform a kernel upgrade or VirtualBox upgrade, which gets
annoying. You can't use such virtual machines for DirectX 10+
applications either (although this can sometimes be accomplished via
other means such as Xen PCI passthrough, depending on the hardware).

Shockingly, many laptops still seem to be sold with only 4Gb of RAM,
which isn't ideal for virtualizing Windows.

Further, most people acquire Windows OEM licenses with their
hardware. These generally are very troublesome to get working in a
virtual machine because they look for the specific hardware the
installation shipped with to activate (or sometimes to even run), and
VirtualBox masks most of that.

If you've got the RAM, a retail Windows license, no need for high-end
accelerated graphics or USB 2.0, and Wine won't do the trick,
VirtualBox is definitely worth considering.

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