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#1 2019-08-14 19:22:09

Roken
Member
From: South Wales, UK
Registered: 2012-01-16
Posts: 1,251

Portable Windows 10

Read on - this is an Arch question.

My daily driver is Arch. desktop, laptop and a portable USB drive that will boot on almost any system.

Windows 10 is much less portable, being tied to the HW in most cases, but it will run quite happily in VirtualBox, so as an experiment, I'm thinking a portable, minimal Arch that launches VB with Win 10.

What is the minimum I can get away with. For example, if I want to boot a full Windows desktop, do I need xorg?

As I say, this is an experiment, but in my mind, an interesting one. So suggestions what I need and what I don't need.

I'll clearly need to be able to access the underlying Arch OS for updating, but the plan is to hide virtualisation as much as possible whilst making it as portable as possible (i.e. at least on both Intel and AMD host machines).


Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
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#2 2019-08-14 21:46:55

fjvinal
Member
From: Madrid
Registered: 2012-06-23
Posts: 45

Re: Portable Windows 10

I use a SSD with USB adapter. My configuration is:
- GPT partition table: 1st for boot type ef00 formatted as VFAT, 2nd for Arch root formatted as ext4, 3th for virtual machines ans ISO imaged formatted as ext4.
- Boot with systemd boot, automatic login.
- Arch with qemu-kvm and virt-manager. I use Wayland with Sway, but other graphical configurations are possible.
- It is possible to start the virtual machine at login if you need this feature.
Hope this help you.

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#3 2019-08-14 23:23:10

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,441
Website

Re: Portable Windows 10

Roken wrote:

I'm thinking a portable, minimal Arch that launches VB with Win 10.

Minimal and VirtualBox don't belong in the same sentence.  See the above and use qemu ... or just about any other VM/hypervisor other than VB.

Roken wrote:

What is the minimum I can get away with. For example, if I want to boot a full Windows desktop, do I need xorg?

Why use arch for this?  Arch is far from minimal in these terms.  But in any case, you'd need a kernel, and a vm/hypervisor manager.  Really you might not strictly need anything else, but you probably want an init system and a shell.  If you want a graphical windows session, then you will need a display server, either Xorg or wayland, but you definitely don't need a WM.  You may want xinit, but you can launch Xorg and a client (e.g., qemu) manually if you really want to.

Or in other words, the 'base' group of archlinux, a display server, and qemu and it's dependencies is far far more than you'd really need for your purposes.

Last edited by Trilby (2019-08-14 23:25:29)


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#4 2019-08-14 23:29:47

Roken
Member
From: South Wales, UK
Registered: 2012-01-16
Posts: 1,251

Re: Portable Windows 10

I have no objection to using qemu. I chose virt ualbox simply because I could migrate my existing VB config, but I guess that's just me being lazy.

As for "Why Arch", because I know Arch.

So I should be able to get away with a core install, qemu, xorg, and little else smile


Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

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#5 2019-08-14 23:33:08

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,441
Website

Re: Portable Windows 10

You could "get away" with a lot less.  But your requirements seem more driven by what you're familiar with than actual minimal requirements.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with this - but obviously no one else can suggest what you'd be familiar or comfortable with.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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