Looking for a reliable way to generate Windows VMs for testing.q

Jen Bottom

20 Apr 2017 20 Apr '17

9:52 a.m.

Hi everyone, I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time. Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line. I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows. Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows. I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible. At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions. The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running. I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible. What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running. I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes. The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA. I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run. I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box. This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking. Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time? If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go? Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer? Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working. Thanks in advance for any advice. Jen.

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John G Heim

20 Apr 20 Apr

1:31 p.m.

I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically. I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway. The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install. On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

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Fernando Botelho

1:48 p.m.

Hi John, This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location? Thanks, Fernando On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...

I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

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John G Heim

5:03 p.m.

I just uploaded my bash script for creating a debian64 virtualbox vm last week. I put my win7-64 script and a diskette image in the same folder. See http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/. For example, to put your answer file on the virtual diskette, you should be able to do just this: wget http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/win7-64.flp mkdir /media/loop/ mount -o loop win7-64.flp /media/loop/ cp autounattend.xml /media/loop/ umount /media/loop The diskette image has an empty autoinstall file on it. The one I use has my University's license key in it. I can't give you that. So I just nulled out the whole file. The bash script has my home directory hard-coded in. If I have time, I'll fix that. The debian64 script creates a debian 64 machine and starts the installer. If you press the S key shortly after running the script, you should get a talking install. Personally, I intend to look into using vagrant. But I figure these scripts may be useful if for no other reason than to show examples of using vboxmanage. PS: I haven't had any personal time to do the other things we talked about. I'll get to them. Be patient. On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...

Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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John G Heim

5:12 p.m.

One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy. http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...

Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Fernando Botelho

6:56 p.m.

Wonderful, thanks! Fernando On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...

One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Jen Bottom

21 Apr 21 Apr

10:05 a.m.

Just to clarify for my particular case I am using a Mac as my primary OS, which I believe is causing some things to be a bit more complicated than if I had a Windows boX. I guess Vagrant on Windows would use RDP or what ever automatically when configuring a Windows Box, but I am not sure. Favourite platforms aside, I am not going to get a new machine at work any time soon, so a Mac is the host OS I am working with. Does anyone know how you get Vagrant to put your PowerShell scripts on the Windows Box? One of the issues I have is that the provisioner scripts do not get moved on to the box. Also if anyone knows or an accessible VirtualBox build for MacOS great, but if not then I am planning to get the VMWare plugin and use this with Vagrant. I have no problem building and running Linux boxes, but Windows is a different beast. Any further advice appreciated. Thanks, Jen. On 4/20/17, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...

Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Jen Bottom

10:05 a.m.

...

Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

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Andrew Hodgson

10:09 a.m.

Hi, The best way is to provision your box with an inline PowerShell script which exposes WinRM over the network, then let Vagrant connect using WinRM to do whatever you need to do on the box. It's horrible and I try and avoid WinRM wherever possible and let the inline scripts do everything, but as a start use WinRM. Andrew. ________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] on behalf of Jen Bottom [jen.bottom@gmail.com] Sent: 21 April 2017 11:05 To: Fernando.Botelho@f123.org; Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Looking for a reliable way to generate Windows VMs for testing.q Just to clarify for my particular case I am using a Mac as my primary OS, which I believe is causing some things to be a bit more complicated than if I had a Windows boX. I guess Vagrant on Windows would use RDP or what ever automatically when configuring a Windows Box, but I am not sure. Favourite platforms aside, I am not going to get a new machine at work any time soon, so a Mac is the host OS I am working with. Does anyone know how you get Vagrant to put your PowerShell scripts on the Windows Box? One of the issues I have is that the provisioner scripts do not get moved on to the box. Also if anyone knows or an accessible VirtualBox build for MacOS great, but if not then I am planning to get the VMWare plugin and use this with Vagrant. I have no problem building and running Linux boxes, but Windows is a different beast. Any further advice appreciated. Thanks, Jen. On 4/20/17, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...

Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Andrew Hodgson

10:09 a.m.

...

Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

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Jen Bottom

10:17 a.m.

Apologies, I mean 'winrm' not 'rdp'. Cheers, Jen. On 4/21/17, Jen Bottom wrote:

...

Just to clarify for my particular case I am using a Mac as my primary OS, which I believe is causing some things to be a bit more complicated than if I had a Windows boX.

I guess Vagrant on Windows would use RDP or what ever automatically when configuring a Windows Box, but I am not sure.

Favourite platforms aside, I am not going to get a new machine at work any time soon, so a Mac is the host OS I am working with.

Does anyone know how you get Vagrant to put your PowerShell scripts on the Windows Box?

One of the issues I have is that the provisioner scripts do not get moved on to the box.

Also if anyone knows or an accessible VirtualBox build for MacOS great, but if not then I am planning to get the VMWare plugin and use this with Vagrant.

I have no problem building and running Linux boxes, but Windows is a different beast.

Any further advice appreciated.

Thanks, Jen.

On 4/20/17, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Jen Bottom

10:17 a.m.

Apologies, I mean 'winrm' not 'rdp'. Cheers, Jen. On 4/21/17, Jen Bottom wrote:

...

Just to clarify for my particular case I am using a Mac as my primary OS, which I believe is causing some things to be a bit more complicated than if I had a Windows boX.

I guess Vagrant on Windows would use RDP or what ever automatically when configuring a Windows Box, but I am not sure.

Favourite platforms aside, I am not going to get a new machine at work any time soon, so a Mac is the host OS I am working with.

Does anyone know how you get Vagrant to put your PowerShell scripts on the Windows Box?

One of the issues I have is that the provisioner scripts do not get moved on to the box.

Also if anyone knows or an accessible VirtualBox build for MacOS great, but if not then I am planning to get the VMWare plugin and use this with Vagrant.

I have no problem building and running Linux boxes, but Windows is a different beast.

Any further advice appreciated.

Thanks, Jen.

On 4/20/17, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Jen Bottom

5:22 p.m.

Thanks for the tip, I will give it a go! Have you had more experience with Puttet or Chef. I know it's a learning overhead but if at the end I can get a reliable system every time, I don't mind learning a new tool. I'm guessign you have to expose winrm what ever though? Cheers, Jen. On 4/21/17, Jen Bottom wrote:

...

Apologies,

I mean 'winrm' not 'rdp'.

Cheers, Jen.

On 4/21/17, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Just to clarify for my particular case I am using a Mac as my primary OS, which I believe is causing some things to be a bit more complicated than if I had a Windows boX.

I guess Vagrant on Windows would use RDP or what ever automatically when configuring a Windows Box, but I am not sure.

Favourite platforms aside, I am not going to get a new machine at work any time soon, so a Mac is the host OS I am working with.

Does anyone know how you get Vagrant to put your PowerShell scripts on the Windows Box?

One of the issues I have is that the provisioner scripts do not get moved on to the box.

Also if anyone knows or an accessible VirtualBox build for MacOS great, but if not then I am planning to get the VMWare plugin and use this with Vagrant.

I have no problem building and running Linux boxes, but Windows is a different beast.

Any further advice appreciated.

Thanks, Jen.

On 4/20/17, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I > haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not > actually a Windows person much of the time. > > Background: > I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to > third line. > > I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps > on Windows. > > Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more > accessible, > starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows. > > I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs > for > testing that is as fast as possible. > > At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility > makes this an easier process than older versions. > > The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 > to > Win10, with NVDA running. > > I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if > that is possible. > > What I have tried so far: > I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very > long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA > installed and running. > > I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes. > > The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA. > > I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would > not run. > > I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts > to > automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the > box. > > This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking. > > Questions: > Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty > and > then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine > when the Vagrant script runs for the first time? > > If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go? > > Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch > using Packer? > > Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility > on > the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the > Vagrant > Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once > they > are built and working. > > Thanks in advance for any advice. > > Jen. > > _______________________________________________ > Blind-sysadmins mailing list > Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org > https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins >

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Jen Bottom

5:22 p.m.

...

Apologies,

I mean 'winrm' not 'rdp'.

Cheers, Jen.

On 4/21/17, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Just to clarify for my particular case I am using a Mac as my primary OS, which I believe is causing some things to be a bit more complicated than if I had a Windows boX.

I guess Vagrant on Windows would use RDP or what ever automatically when configuring a Windows Box, but I am not sure.

Favourite platforms aside, I am not going to get a new machine at work any time soon, so a Mac is the host OS I am working with.

Does anyone know how you get Vagrant to put your PowerShell scripts on the Windows Box?

One of the issues I have is that the provisioner scripts do not get moved on to the box.

Also if anyone knows or an accessible VirtualBox build for MacOS great, but if not then I am planning to get the VMWare plugin and use this with Vagrant.

I have no problem building and running Linux boxes, but Windows is a different beast.

Any further advice appreciated.

Thanks, Jen.

On 4/20/17, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Wonderful, thanks!

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 02:12 PM, John G Heim wrote:

...
One more thing, I also uploaded a bash script I use to read the screen of a virtualbox virtual machine as it's booting. If for some reason, the vm doesn't boot or if the Win7 install hangs, I run this script. It takes a screen cap and runs it through tesseract. So you have to have tesseract installed. The recognition is truely aweful but most of the time it is just barely good enough for me to figure out what the problem is. The alternative is using a mobile phone with KNFBReader or something like that. But the script is quick/easy.

http://www.iavit.org/~john/virtualbox/screencap

On 04/20/2017 08:48 AM, Fernando Botelho wrote:

...
Hi John,

This is something I would be interested in as well. Can you send me your scripts, or point me to the right download location?

Thanks,

Fernando

On 04/20/2017 10:31 AM, John G Heim wrote:

...
I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I > haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not > actually a Windows person much of the time. > > Background: > I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to > third line. > > I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps > on Windows. > > Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more > accessible, > starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows. > > I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs > for > testing that is as fast as possible. > > At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility > makes this an easier process than older versions. > > The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 > to > Win10, with NVDA running. > > I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if > that is possible. > > What I have tried so far: > I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very > long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA > installed and running. > > I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes. > > The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA. > > I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would > not run. > > I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts > to > automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the > box. > > This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking. > > Questions: > Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty > and > then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine > when the Vagrant script runs for the first time? > > If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go? > > Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch > using Packer? > > Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility > on > the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the > Vagrant > Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once > they > are built and working. > > Thanks in advance for any advice. > > Jen. > > _______________________________________________ > Blind-sysadmins mailing list > Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org > https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins >

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Katherine M. Moss

20 Apr 20 Apr

1:51 p.m.

There is a more modern way to do this ... you can do it with Hyper-V as Well, maybe using Vagrant to create the Hyper-V VM (I have no need for Virtualbox in my case considering everything is Hyper-V), but instead of a diskette (who uses those anymore?), just put the answer file on a second virtual DVD drive; Hyper-V Generation II VMs don't even support diskettes. Just to let you know. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of John G Heim Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2017 9:31 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Looking for a reliable way to generate Windows VMs for testing.q I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically. I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway. The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install. On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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John G Heim

5:55 p.m.

Can you edit the files on a DVD though? With a diskette image, all you have to do is to mount the image on a loopback device and then you can open the answer file in any text editor. I thought that with a DVD image, you have to make a writeable copy of the DVD, edit the copy, and then recreate the DVD with something like mkisofs. On 04/20/2017 08:51 AM, Katherine M. Moss wrote:

...

There is a more modern way to do this ... you can do it with Hyper-V as Well, maybe using Vagrant to create the Hyper-V VM (I have no need for Virtualbox in my case considering everything is Hyper-V), but instead of a diskette (who uses those anymore?), just put the answer file on a second virtual DVD drive; Hyper-V Generation II VMs don't even support diskettes. Just to let you know.

-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of John G Heim Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2017 9:31 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Looking for a reliable way to generate Windows VMs for testing.q

I use virtualbox when I need a Windows machine. In fact, I have a bash script that calls the virtualbox command line tool, vboxmanage, to create a virtual machine and install Win7 automatically. I use vboxmanage to add a DVD player to the virtual machine, insert the Windows installation DVD into it, and then add a virtual diskette with an answer file so the Windows installation procedes automatically.

I use a bash script for this but I recently heard of a tool called vagrant that allows you to create virtualbox virtual machines by putting specifications into a text file. I will probably try that next time. But if you want my bash script, let me know. It might be useful if for no other reason than to serve as an example of using the vboxmanage command. Of course, there is a lot out there on google anyway.

The only tricky part might be creating a diskette image with an answer file. I'm still stuck on Win7 so I don't even know if the Win10 installer even takes an answer file. I certainly hope they didn't re-do that again though. So if you have an answer file, you can create a diskette image with the dd command, mount it on a loopback device, format the diskette like any other diskette, and copy the answer file to it. So then when you boot the virtual machine with the Windows installer DVD in the virtual DVD drive, it goes out, finds the answer file on the virtual diskette, and does the install.

On 04/20/2017 04:52 AM, Jen Bottom wrote:

...
Hi everyone,

I know this seems to come up quite a lot in various forms, but I haven't yet found a solution that works well for me and I'm not actually a Windows person much of the time.

Background: I work in tech support and do everything currently from first to third line.

I'm mainly on Mac and Linux, but some times I need to test GUI apps on Windows.

Also there is now a drive to make one of our products more accessible, starting with NVDA/Jaws on Windows.

I therefore want a way to be able to reliably spin up Windows VMs for testing that is as fast as possible.

At present I would be happy with only Windows10, if accessibility makes this an easier process than older versions.

The ultimate would be to have the ability to spin up VMs from Win7 to Win10, with NVDA running.

I am happy to use pre-built Vagrant boxes, to save on build time if that is possible.

What I have tried so far: I did some experiments with Vagrant and Packer, but this took a very long time and I never really got to the state of getting NVDA installed and running.

I then tried with some of the pre-build Windows boxes.

The plan was to install chocolaty, then use it to install NVDA.

I could not do this over SSH, because the power shell scripts would not run.

I tried switching to using RDP, but still could not get the scripts to automatically run, because they were not getting transferred to the box.

This may be because my knowledge of Vagrant is lacking.

Questions: Is it possible to provision a pre-built Windows box with Chocolaty and then NVDA, using a power shell script that is placed on the machine when the Vagrant script runs for the first time?

If not, then is using something like Puppet or Chef the way to go?

Or, is the way to get what I want to build the boxes from scratch using Packer?

Not sure if this matters but I have found VirtualBox accessibility on the MAc to be really really lacking, so am planning to get the Vagrant Plugin for VMWare, so I can actually access my machines GUI once they are built and working.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Jen.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Andrew Hodgson
Fernando Botelho
Jen Bottom
John G Heim
Katherine M. Moss

Looking for a reliable way to generate Windows VMs for testing.q

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