Virtualization

How to run Windows 11 in a KVM virtual machine

Submitted by Scott Dowdle on Fri, 11/12/2021 - 19:27

First of all... "What!?!  An article about Microsoft Windows on this Linux oriented website?!?!"  Yes.  Hey, I'm running Windows 11 as a KVM virtual machine on my Dell Latitude E6440 laptop that is 6+ years old... using Fedora 35 as my VM Host.  I don't think Windows 11 would want to run on the physical hardware either... but the method I mention should make it work in many places that it would refuse to because of hardware requirements enforced by the installer.

Make sure when creating the VM (I did so using virt-manager), to make it a UEFI-based VM and not Legacy BIOS and giving it at least 4GB of RAM.  When the installer gets to the point where it tells you that your PC does not meet the hardware configuration requirements, do the following:

1) Hit shift-F10 on the keyboard which will bring up a command prompt
2) From the command line, run "regedit"
3) Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup add a new item named "LabConfig"
4) Within the newly created LabConfig item, make two DWORD entries setting their values both to hex 1
     BypassTPMCheck and BypassSecureBootCheck
5) Exit regedit, close the command window and back in the installer, hit the left arrow in the top left of the window (do not click on the X at the top right).  That will back up a step in the installer, and you can go Next again, and it will no longer complain about your hardware.

Once the install is done make sure to install the Windows guest tools from spice-space.org... and then you'll get higher resolutions and improved performance.

Will this problem ever crop up again?  I'm not sure but I can tell you it still worked after applying all of the available updates including a cumulative update.  Good luck.

Proxmox VE - Upgrade from 6.4 to 7.0

Submitted by Scott Dowdle on Tue, 08/10/2021 - 19:42

A while ago I decided to take the plunge by upgrading the 5-node Proxmox VE cluster at work from the 6.4 version (based on Debian 10) to the new 7.x version (based on Debian 11).  Debian hasn't made a GA release of 11 yet so some thought it curious that Proxmox would release PVE 7.4 to GA.

How was the upgrade process?  Proxmox VE is a very light-weight system and doesn't use a whole lot of packages so it was a very easy upgrade process.  Historically, Debian is one of the most pain-free upgrades among the Linux distributions.  PVE does have some advanced features but I'm not using any of them...  no ZFS, no Ceph distributed storage, etc.  All of my VMs use a qcow2 disk image file stored on an standard partition formatted with XFS.   I'm not currently using a lot of containers (mostly VMs) so the switch from cgroups v1 to v2 didn't impact me.  They do have good documentation on the upgrade process as well as a software tool named pve6to7.  I ran pve6to7 and it found no issues.  I backed up all of my VMs and upgraded the first host without incident and then did all of the other hosts one-by-one until they were all complete.  I haven't noticed any issues post upgrade.  There have been quite a number of updates since the upgrade but I'm guessing that is fairly normal as Debian 11 approaches GA release.

What's new in 7.x?  Not a whole lot... at least not in this, the initial release.  The big change is the move to a newer version of Debian... which I imagine was quite some work.  I'd expect them to add more new substancial features in future 7.x releases.  I do post a video below from them showing the main new features in 7.x so far.  Enjoy!

Video: AlmaLinux 8.4 installable Live XFCE Media

Submitted by Scott Dowdle on Fri, 06/04/2021 - 19:47

I've been wanting and trying to create live media for EL8 since the initial 8.0 release of CentOS.  The main problem I ran into is that RHEL has decided that their customers aren't interested in live media and they didn't produce any... and CentOS hasn't either.  I've been using livecd-creator from the livecd-tools package for years for making personal remixes of Fedora and CentOS 7.  In EL8, livecd-creator comes from EPEL and it has had various issues since the initial 8.0 release... and I've only been able to produce broken .iso media if I could get it to build at all.  Luckily one or more Fedora developers have taken pity on me and been updating / fixing livecd-creator in EPEL recently.

Another problem is that RHEL also decided that since they don't have live media anymore, the RHEL Anaconda installer no longer needs to support live media installs, and they have removed the anaconda-live package from their stock repositories... although I did learn today that it is built by CentOS but just not placed in the public repositories... but if you look for it hard enough, it can be found in their newly opened up build servers.

I've been working with AlmaLinux a bit lately and they provide the anaconda-live package in their off-by-default (and shouldn't really be used for production systems) devel repository.

With the updated livecd-creator and the newly found source(s) for anaconda-live... I've renewed my efforts and finally was able to produce an AlmaLinux 8.4 installable XFCE live media.  I did run into some qwerks that are explained in the screencast below that shows me booting the media in a KVM virtual machine, doing and install, and then showing a little bit of the post-install desktop system.  The .iso includes a /root/livecd-creator directory that has all of the files I used to build the media with and the system has all of the needed packages pre-installed for building.  Anyone who might want to make their own remix can do some minor editing (updating the repository URLs as they currently point to a local mirror I'm using... as well as customizing the package list as desired) of the included files and build their own.  Enjoy!

If anyone wants a copy of the .iso, just email me (see web page footer for contact info) asking for a download link and I'll reply back... as I do not publicly promote MontanaLinux as it is primarily a personal remix.

UPDATE: Anyone who wants to build their own media needs to be aware that there are currently two bugs in livecd-creator... one already fixed in the livecd-tools package currently in epel-updates-testing, and one that needs to be manually patched.   The manual patch is easy though, just edit /usr/lib/python-3.6/site-packages/imgcreate/live.py and add a new after line 239 (Line 239: # XXX-BCL; does this need --label?).  Put in the following:
            makedirs(isodir + "/images")
So make sure you are using livecd-tools-28.1-1 from epel-updates-testing with the given 0ne-line patch and you should be able to build working media.

UPDATE 2:  I fixed the XFCE media so now it uses SDDM rather than GDM and the live media automatically logs into XFCE.  I have also added media for KDE Plasma and GNOME (aka WORK).  They all seem to be working well but I haven't tested them on UEFI.

UPDATE3: I believe I'm missing one or more packages needed to install the bootloader on UEFI systems.  All of my (working) testing has been on Legacy BIOS-based VMs.  I'll get it fixed ASAP.

UPDATE4: It should work on both Legacy BIOS and UEFI (including secure boot enabled) now.  It was an issue with livecd-creator that has gotten fixed.

Video file