back to article Click your heels, um, mouse thrice and you've quickly got Ubuntu on Hyper-V in Win 10 Pro

Windows 10 users have yet another way to run Linux, thanks to tighter integration between Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. While creating a virtual machine using Hyper-V in Windows 10 is not a particularly arduous activity, the Fall Creators Update brought in a gallery of virtual machines to boot up on the …

  1. Sam Liddicott

    As soon as "seamless mode" is supported I can ditch virtualbox

    1. Bronek Kozicki

      I found that the best way for "seamless mode" is to run a vcxsrv under Windows and configure both PuTTY and sshd for X11 forwarding. Your Linux machine can run anywhere on the network (including your own box - Hyper-V can run your virtual machine in the background). GUI for your Linux hosted programs will show up on Windows screen almost as if it was native application. I rather like running CLion this way (so I have native gcc / clang build despite running Windows, in a virtual machine, on top of headless Linux)

  2. Teiwaz

    any chance I wonder...

    Of reciprocal work on smoother running of Windows ontop of Linux...?

    1. Bronek Kozicki

      Re: any chance I wonder...

      I've been doing that for years and its been working flawlessly for a long time, also for some heavy gaming (e.g. Witcher 3). Granted, my Linux box (and hypervisor) is beefed up and headless. The GPU is exclusively assigned to Windows guest with vfio, so that might not be what you are looking for. Having the ability to just roll back Windows to an old snapshot of "drive C" via ssh to hypervisor is very nice, though.

      1. Teiwaz

        Re: any chance I wonder...

        I've been doing that for years and its been working flawlessly for a long time

        I actually meant Microsoft throwing their oar in to help that side of things as well.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Microsoft ... help?

          "I actually meant Microsoft throwing their oar in to help that side of things as well."

          Is this some new-fangled repurposing of the word "help"?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Microsoft ... help?

            new-fangled?

            Comprehension a problem?

            Microsofts 'commitment' to Open Source is like a a dog humping a table-leg. Only of benefit to the dog.

        2. Bronek Kozicki

          Re: any chance I wonder...

          I actually meant Microsoft throwing their oar in to help

          Given that most of the help in this area comes from RedHat (e.g. virtio drivers) who knows, perhaps Microsoft is actually involved, just indirectly and without the branding.

    2. Androgynous Cow Herd

      Re: any chance I wonder...

      Already done.

      I believe they call that “ESX”

      1. ibmalone

        Re: any chance I wonder...

        Already done.

        I believe they call that “ESX”

        Heck, even VMPlayer is pretty good if you just want it for desktop. (I'm sure KVM will run a windows host, but VMWare handle installing the guest drivers for you.)

    3. N2

      Re: any chance I wonder...

      Of reciprocal work on smoother running of Windows ontop of Linux...?

      Agreed, I'd prefer Linux on bare metal

  3. Craigie

    WSL dead then?

    See title.

    1. geekguy

      Re: WSL dead then?

      wsl scratches a different itch, to say it is dead would be silly, what if all I need to do is run aws cli and i prefer linux, wsl does that no need for a full blown virtual machine.

    2. Jason Hindle

      Re: WSL dead then?

      I think far from dead. The ability to run up a bash shell and do all manner of bashy things* is often far more convenient than running up a full VM. Even my ageing Surface 3 runs WSL perfectly well. Now Hyper-V has me curious. More efficient in practice than running up a VM under VirtualBox?

      * Replacement for Putty and WinSCP, run Bash scripts with all the familiar Linux tools, API testing using Curl and so on.

  4. Kubla Cant

    Solution?

    I recently acquired a sexy new Dell laptop. The fly in the ointment is that it came with Windows 10 installed. Even after several weeks I feel a wave of nausea every time I see the garish applications on the start "menu".

    I've thought about zapping the horrible thing and simply installing Linux, but reports on the web suggest the battery life suffers. I've also tried a dual-boot installation, but it turns out the Ubuntu installer can't see the disk unless I tweak some BIOS setting that can only be changed before installing Windows.

    I wonder if this might be a solution?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Linux

      Re: Solution?

      "I recently acquired a sexy new Dell laptop."

      Me too. I got Arch on it without even having to accept any unwanted license agreements. Being able to update the BIOS from the EFI partition is a welcome change to the contortions Linux users have often suffered in the past (eg convert swap partition to a fat32 f/s so that FreeDOS can run a DOS only updater)

    2. Waseem Alkurdi

      Re: Solution?

      but it turns out the Ubuntu installer can't see the disk unless I tweak some BIOS setting that can only be changed before installing Windows.

      You mean the AHCI/IDE mode.

      Try recompiling a kernel with drivers for your AHCI controller, or even easier, just change to IDE (at least temporarily).

      My nose tells me that your laptop is a consumer (as opposed to business-class) model.

  5. Howard Hanek
    Linux

    Sorry Microsft

    I'm running more and more Ubuntu 18 with windows vm's than the other way around. Much more.

    Build your house on solid rock or sand? Microsoft says our sand is very 'pure' and rock, well it's 'common'.

  6. Someone Else Silver badge
    Meh

    Damning with faint praise

    The mouse tracking was entertaining, too.

    Upon further review, perhaps that wasn't praise, after all....

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nice to see Microsoft spending some of its valuable braintrust working on passion projects like this. Now that this is done, maybe they could go back to something important like, I dunno, making Hybrid Exchange better than the godawful dumpster fire it currently is? Honestly, is that what Clayton Forrester has been working on since he quit working for Deep 13?

  8. Jason Hindle

    Gave it a try today

    Slick but also a reminder why I avoid Ubuntu. Problems with the latest/greatest? Well... Wouldn't ssh or https to anything while connected to the office via Openconnect. Odd really, because I was able to ssh from the corporate Dell to my shiny new Ubuntu VM. A colleague with deep knowledge of ssh helped me with the former. I'm still looking at the latter. I never have these problems with Mint and CENTOS. I've also spun up a Mint VM under Hyper-V, but that takes a little more effort (had to tell it what screen resolution to use, and copy/paste won't work between it and Windows, unlike a VirtualBox resident).

    Also, Hyper-V isn't necessarily better than VirtualBox. Whereas Virtualbox sees your monitor as its monitor, connection to a Hyper-V is via Remote Desktop/X (the only way is headless, it seems). Overall performance is better, but graphic performance is a little sluggish. Good to muck around with these things.

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