This procedure has been tested in Arch Linux. Other distributions may have slightly different package requirements or naming conventions.

Required packages

• swtpm — provides TPM 2.0
• edk2-ovmf — provides EFI/Secureboot filesystem image

ISO images needed

• Windows 11 installation disk
• VirtIO driver disk

Extract Windows OEM product key from host system

If the system was shipped with a pre-installed Windows OS, it has the Windows licencing information in BIOS

$ sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
MSDMU
TLENOVOTP-N32  p
PTEC
AAAA1-AAAAA-AAAA1-1A1AA-11AA1 ← not my real product key

The last line is the product key

Create a new VM

4 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs are the minumum requirements for Windows 11

Windows 11 requires a minimum of 64 GB of disk space

Make sure you check the box “Customize configuration before install” and hit “Finish”

Change the “Firmware” setup to UEFI x86_64: /usr/share/edk2-ovmf/x64/OVMF_CODE_secboot.fd

You can now hit “Begin Installation” and proceed with the Windows 11 installation and initial setup

Install Windows 11

OS installation

Make sure you select the same OS edition as the one for which you have an OEM licence (e.g.: Windows 11 Professional).

Initial setup

If you don't want to enrol a Microsoft Live account, answer that you want to use a Work or Active Directory account (Windows 11 Professional and up): this will take you to the local account creation screens.

Paravirtualized drivers

VirtIO drivers provide better performance and should be used when possible. The Spice video drivers also allow for seamless mouse cursor movement, dynamic resolution changes as well as drag-and-drop operations from Gnome to the Windows desktop (one way only)

VirtIO drivers installation

• mount the VirtIO driver/guest agent ISO
• install the drivers and guest agent

Change system disk (SATA→VirtIO)

The default system disk is created as a SATA drive. Changing it to VirtIO immediately will not work because Windows has to load the VirtIO disk drivers at least once before it is able to boot from a VirtIO system disk. We need to created dummy VirtIO disk first.

• shut down the VM
• add a 1GB VirtIO hard disk
• power on the VM and let the OS load completely
• sign in and check that Disk Manager sees an extra disk (you don't need to initialise it)
• shut down the VM
• delete the 1GB VirtIO drive
• change the system disk type from SATA to VirtIO — you need to edit the XML file to perform this operation (either through virsh or from the virt-manager GUI, after having enabled XML file edition)

Initial disk configuration:

<disk type="file" device="disk">
  <driver name="qemu" type="qcow2"/>
  <source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/Windows11.qcow2"/>
  <target dev="sda" bus="sata"/>
</disk>

Modified disk configuration:

<disk type="file" device="disk">
  <driver name="qemu" type="qcow2"/>
  <source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/Windows11.qcow2"/>
  <target dev="vda" bus="virtio"/>
  <address type="pci" domain="0x0000" bus="0x05" slot="0x00" function="0x0"/>
</disk>

Other devices

Now that the VirtIO drivers have been installed in Windows, you can change the NIC type from Intel e1000e to VirtIO via the virt-manager GUI

Activate Windows

Use the product key extracted from BIOS information (see above)

You can now proceed witht he system updates and start using the Windows VM.

— Kicou

I have tried various remote assistance solutions and so far none had completely met our expecations.

We purchased Zoho Assist because its web-based control centre is ideal for a small team of independent Linux consultants like us, all the while having the features you'd expect from an enterprise-grade product. We were happy to purchase endpoint licence packages for paying customers, and fall back to DWS for less critical systems as well as personal machines.

While I have nothing against Zoho and am supportive of DWS, both solutions have a huge drawback in my opinion: we are relying on a third party to manage traffic to our customers, and we have no control over the data we put on their servers. Not that I believe that they are ill-intentioned, but we have to admit that we are also at the mercy of their technical and business choices: they may decide to suddenly change their pricing structure (this has happened with competing products like Logmein or Teamviewer), or they could change the product, remove features, move them to different tier, etc. and we wouldn't have much of choice, would we?

Having settled on Zoho Assist I was content with our choice and was not really looking for an alternative. That is until I stumbled upon a project called Mesh Central 2 while scouring Reddit, and was immediately seduced.

Mesh Central 2 originates from the team that developed the tools to manage AMT (Active Management Technology), an Intel feature integrated into business PCs equipped with the vPro option. It is the equivalent of the BMC (Baseboard Management Control) module you can find in servers under various names (iDrac for Dell, iLO for HPE, IMM/XCC for IBM/Lenovo). An out-of-band system that allows you to manage the machine at a hardware level, even before the operating system has been loaded. You can thus remotely power on, power off, enter the BIOS menu, etc. without user intervention.

Mesh Central expands on the AMT hardware remote features and adds remote access to Windows, Linux (Intel and ARM), BSD (Intel) and MacOSX desktops, all this from an easily self-hosted web dashboard running on Node.js.

And it works wonderfully.

My only (minor) gripe is that it is not visually appealing (the interface feels a bit dated), but since it is Open Source, under an Apache 2.0 licence and available on GitHub, it is customisable (a few tweaks to the CSS can make a huge difference) and allows for easy branding.

Do not be put off by its “beta” status: it is fully functional and the amount of enterprise features is astounding. There are so many configuration options that its documentation is not even close to listing all of them, but the main developers are very reactive on Reddit and Github and will answer users' questions rather quickly.

I was able to quickly put in place a working solution with Active Directory authentication, ACLs, FIDO U2F and TOTP, and deployed agents to a few dozen client systems (desktops and servers running Windows and Linux).

I think we have a winner here: a product that is functional, enterprise-ready, open source, free as in speech, free as in beer, backed by a heavy-weight corporate sponsor (meaning that they are not desperate for funding) and that is very active on GitHub.

And even though the main developer is based in the Intel offices of Hillsboro, Oregon, when watching his tutorial videos I was able to recognise what I believe is a hint of a Québec accent: Yay ! un compère francophone du Canada ! :)

I don't know why I had not heard of Mesh Central 2 before but I am definitely a convert! I think that comes autumn we will not be renewing our Zoho Assist licences…

— Kicou

A client of mine has a customer of his who runs a Windows 2000 Terminal Server because their antique ERP client will only run on Windows XP-level machines.

I already converted the ERP server last week: a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server running Oracle 10g that I had to turn into CentOS because its RHN subscription had run out and I needed a newer kernel + headers for vmware-guest tools. The RHEL P2V worked well, and now it is the W2K TS's turn.

The Hypervisor I am moving this to is ESXi 6.5 and it turns out VMware Converter 6 will not migrate a Windows 2000 system: for this you need Vmware Converter 4. But Converter 4 will not migrate to ESXi higher than V4.

So how do we do?

Well, here is what I am in the middle of doing:

• install ESXi 4 in ESXi 6 (yes, you can nest ESX installations)
• convert the Win2k system to ESXi 4 (you can do this on the live system) with VMware Converter 4
• DO NOT start the newly converted VM in ESXi 4!
• fire up a Windows system that has access to both the ESXi 4 virtual OS and the ESXi 6 infrastructure
• install VMware converter 6 onto the Windows machine, and perform a V2V offline conversion of the intermediate W2K VM to ESXi 6

I have not finished migration yet (I have to upload Win10 ISO to have my Windows system) but as crazy as it sounds, I think it should work.

Update: it actually did work. I had to install an old version of the VMware Tools that is compatible with Windows 2000 to have proper display drivers and in order for networking to work. Everything is working now.

— Kicou

When daughter started university two years ago, she got a used Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen2 (2014) running Ubuntu (kids grew up on recycled machines using Linux), and she was very happy to have a good computer she didn't have to pay for. However this summer she started to have problems with it. I suspect these are mostly software problems, but she also had two missing keys on the keyboard. Sourcing a replacement keyboard and replacing it with the risk of it not working at all was a problem as she cannot afford much downtime, with all her schoolwork and two volunteering positions as a crisis line responder.

I know how she treats electronic devices (i.e. badly) so I did not want to invest into something too expensive, but I still wanted the best bang for the bucks.

So for the first time in many, many years, I decided to purchase a new computer. I know how she treats electronic devices (i.e. badly) so I did not want to invest into something too expensive, but I still wanted the best bang for the bucks. Daughter had also expressed the wish to get a 2-in-1 that she can convert into a tablet for displaying music sheet when playing the piano.

I got her a Lenovo Ideapad Flex5 14 aka 14ARE05 (awkward name), a budget-friendly 2-in-1 notebook computer with a 14” display, AMD Ryzen 4500U processor, 16 GB or RAM and 512 GB or SDD storage, 10+ hours of battery life. For $950 CAD (around $700 USD) it is a reasonably priced considering how Canadians usually get an unfavourable exchange rate.

The big unknown was how well the machine would run Linux. I opted for Ubuntu because daughter will have to install software by herself; Ubuntu being the most widespread distribution, she is more likely to find online resources and instructions that apply to her system.

I also installed a Windows 10 VM so that she has access to a Windows environment in the event that her school or work require the use of proprietary software, but I doubt she will ever need to start it.

I kept the original Windows 10 OS, shrinking it to minimum: this is for firmware updates only and she should never need to use it.

The system automatically boots into Ubuntu 20.04. Everything worked out of the box save for two small details: display brightness control and automatic screen rotation.

With the stock Ubuntu kernel (5.4), brightness control has no effect at all. To solve that I installed one of the latest mainline kernel (5.7.8) and brightness can now somehow be adjusted: increasing works fine, decreasing goes halfway down and then turns off the display altogether, but you can turn it back on by going up. A bit quirky, but it still works.

Kernel 5.7.9 introduced a bug where the touch-screen became unresponsive, so I stayed on 5.7.8, but I expect newer versions to fix that. It is an experimental kernel after all.

2021-01 edit: the 5.8.x family of kernels had a bug where the integrated microphone ceased to function. However all is well now with the 5.10 kernel

As for automatic screen rotation, it looks like the orientation sensor is detected but the driver does not read values properly. I showed daughter how to change display orientation manually and it is not a big deal.

I am pretty sure it is only a matter of time until somebody figures it out. This Lenovo model was just released and while I was expecting some problems, I must say that overall the system is perfectly usable as is.

So would I advise the purchase of the Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5 14 (AMD) to use with Linux?

Yes, definitely. For the price, this machine has very solid specs and can be used as a fully functional daily driver running Linux.

— Kicou