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Comment by ykonstant

4 days ago

Is there a way to chain launch a "qemu VM --> windows 10 client --> autodesk product" in a transparent way? If we could do that reliably and with a stripped down win10 image, I think the serious office users could just pretend they are running autodesk or whatever software in linux. The big downside I presume is this will not work with software that need tight interaction with custom hardware (mocap suits etc).

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ykonstant

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stuckindoors  4 days ago

'Winapps' and 'winboat' on Linux allow a windows image to run in a Linux docker container and permit just the app to be streamed to the Linux desktop (after initial setup). I haven't played with it yet..but you could theoretically set up a windows host on a different remote server via tailscale or netbird and have them RDP into the windows docker container remotely.

Unfortunately my parents run macos and these tools are not meant for Macos. But like you said there are apps like UTM that provide a nice shell for QEMU on macos. Not as nice as streaming just the app, but a good start. These work great on new macmini with apple silicon.

exceptione  4 days ago

Yes, doing that by hand would be three lines of bash to launch it.

  virsh start ms-malware11 # or any other method to launch your vm
  sleep 20
  remmina -c /home/me/ms-malware11.remmina

Make a shortcut to above script and the only thing the user needs to do is click it .

It requires a bit of setup on Linux. First install a win11 vm, you can do it graphically via `virtual machine manager` from libvirt. Then install remmina and configure a profile `ms-malware11.remmina`, also graphically. In that profile, under Advanced, have Startup Program "AutoDesk.exe" or whatever that is called.

Then Autodesk runs like any linux application, the user doesn't see it runs in a vm. This feature depends on RemoteApp feature in Windows.

This is something your mom probably wouldn't setup by hand, but anybody here should be able to.

  • Spivak  4 days ago

    libvirtd really is such a quality piece of software making local VMs so trivial to spin up and manage.

    Hyper-V and Virtualization Framework wish they were so user friendly.

tremon  3 days ago

I built that setup over a decade ago, when I virtualized my parents' WinXP installation and gave them Debian on the host.

  - transparent ethernet switch on the host (i.e. br0)
  - old disk copied into an LVM volume (to ease with later migrations and partition growth)
  - qemu instance managed by virt-manager (for autostart and managed shutdown)
  - tty5 linked to spice-client in its own X server (i.e. startx -- spice-client-gtk in inittab)

I considered my solution kinda hacky back then, it effectively ran the entire spice client as root. But it did what it needed to do, and I'm sure it would have been trivial to add a su call somewhere in the startup chain.

I'm sure that between systemd and virtd the same solution should be easier to build today, if it weren't for Wayland and logind complicating the hell out of single-app (think kiosk mode) display sessions.