{"id":656,"date":"2024-03-05T16:41:01","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T16:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/?p=656"},"modified":"2024-03-05T16:42:15","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T16:42:15","slug":"this-is-virtually-amazing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/this-is-virtually-amazing\/","title":{"rendered":"This is virtually amazing!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been wanting to change my main PC from Windows to Linux for ages, but held back because there are a few applications on it that I found didn’t have a Linux equivalent, such as the old version of OneNote that I like, and the Canon photographic utilities for my DSLR camera. The OneNote version is the one that just works<\/strong> on the local machine, rather than the newer one that insists on putting things “in the cloud”. I want my data here, not somewhere I am unable to control, and might get disconnected from. I have a strong dislike of dual booting systems, from back when they used to be a real pig to work with, and kept going wrong…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of people have told me, “Oh, you can run your Windows software under Linux, using Wine”. There’s something wrong with me, as I never could get any of those programs to work in Wine. I think I prefer wine to Wine… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I needed, clearly, was to keep a virtual copy of the PC, and run it on the Linux machine. And it turns out you can…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A while back, I had moved as much data as I could from C: to my 4 Terabyte D: drive, planning to keep the programs that used the data on the boot SSD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, I used VMware’s useful converter program, to make a virtual machine from the PC’s SSD. For some reason, VirtualBox isn’t yet able to do this. I’m more used to VirtualBox, which seems to have better support than VMware, so I fed VMware’s resulting virtual PC into a converter that outputs a VirtualBox machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having saved that very carefully, in more than one place, I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon on a brand new SSD on the PC, and started the fun of getting used to it. It’s really good these days, and “just works”. I put VirtualBox and RealVNC on Mint, and found that my saved virtual Windows 10 computer ran just fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, actually not the first time, it didn’t. Reverting to Windows 10 was easy, because it was on the old SSD, and I was able to fix the things I had forgotten to do. There is a snag here, in that each time I return to Linux, the Data drive gets changed to a read only file system. There’s a simple fix for that snafu, that I will mention when I remember what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, normally, I use a Chromebook around the house, to access the PC and all the little Raspberry Pi computers I run. Mrs Walrus seems to prefer to have me where she can see me, or maybe she likes my company, and I do an awful lot on what used to be her<\/em> Chromebook. I was already using the Chrome browser on the Chromebook to do remote access to the Windows PC. To my absolute delight, when I fired that up, it connected to the virtualised PC on the Linux machine. When software is good, it can be very good indeed!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon, I must get the Chromebook to remote directly into Linux Mint as well. Mint is just fine using RealVNC Connect to work the Pi computers, so now I have more than one way to access them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

End of Part 1…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been wanting to change my main PC from Windows to Linux for ages, but held back because there are a few applications on it that I found didn’t have a Linux equivalent, such as the old version of OneNote that I like, and the Canon photographic utilities for my DSLR camera. The OneNote version … Continue reading “This is virtually amazing!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[24,21,22,23],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","tag-linux-mint","tag-virtualbox","tag-vmware","tag-windows-10"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660,"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions\/660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doctor-dark.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}