I use VirtualBox for linux and Windows as the guest OS. I've been very impressed with VirtualBox. They have a really nice command line interface that as far as I can tell allows you to do pretty much everything. I understand there is a tool called vagrant that allows you to configure VirtualBox virtual machines. I haven't had time to investigate that yet. I have a bash script that allows me to create a vmwith the Win7 installer iso in a virtual DVD drive and a diskette image with an installer answer file in a virtual diskette drive. So when I boot the vm, it automatically does a custom Win7 install. So I don't necessarily even keep the Win7 vm around because I can recreate it so easily. You can probably do this in vmware too but another cool thing I do is to use a script that does a screen capture of the virtual machine and feeds it directly to an OCR program, tesseract. The text is usually pretty jumbled but it is usually good enough for me to figure out if there is something wrong. I've had my braille display connected to a virtual machine but I think it was a lot of work. You have to get the UUID of the USB device before connecting it to a vm. And the UUID is different every time you boot the vm unless you do something fancy -- exactly what that something is escapes me right now. Normally what you have to do is run a virtualbox command to list the UUID of the device and then cut/paste the UUID into another virtualbox command to connect it to the vm. There is some way to avoid that but right now I don't recall what it is. On 05/23/2017 05:15 PM, Jason White via Blind-sysadmins wrote:
I'm contemplating the purchase of a new laptop, having reached the conclusion that I'll probably need to run Linux and Windows alongside each other. The right way to do this (minimizing reboots) is to virtualize one of them. I can use screen readers in both environments, and also have a braille display that would need to be switched between the two. There are plenty of opportunities for problems and inconveniences here.
Is there a virtualization environment that reliably works in this scenario? I've used KVM under Linux before, but only with a Linux guest OS. I know Microsoft have their own virtualization solution that could be used with Windows as the host system and Linux as the guest.
Linux is the system with which I've had most experience. I've been using a Windows 10 machine at work, and there are some applications only available there that I know I'll need to some extent (principally, OCR tools and Microsoft Office, at least until LibreOffice accessibility under Linux improves sufficiently). There are also some teleconferencing applications such as WebEx that I may need. I'll probably also need Linux software that isn't compatible with the Linux Subsystem for Windows, which is why I'm preparing for the likely need to virtualize one of the operating systems.
I'm just investigating my options at this stage. Relevant information would be welcome.
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