Thanks. Your thoughts led me to the
idea of trying Wine in a virtualized instance of GNU/Linux, so any
Windows applications would be sandboxed and not have access to my
physical computer. (I see at
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-f566a12c806a1eacaeefb7cb6419a513a773c571
that there are also other ways to achieve sandboxing, with which
I'm not yet familiar: AppArmor, SELinux).
Michael
Siepmann, Ph.D.
The Tech Design Psychologist™
Make your technology more supportive™
303-835-0501 TechDesignPsych.com
OpenPGP: 6D65A4F7
On 03/17/2015 08:25 PM, Adam Bolte wrote:
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.