kota's “memex”

running software on linux

The wine compatibility layer can be used for a great deal of software and this tends to have very good performance, sometimes better than running natively on windows. Steam has wine built-in these days under the name proton with some additional glue to translate dx12 to vulcan.

With some software like MS office or the Adobe suite you simply can't run the latest versions using wine and instead need to run them in kvm or some other virtual machine. There's a tool called winapps which uses kvm and remote desktop to make it so you can run windows programs seamlessly on linux as if they were locally installed.

create install media

It's harder than you would think. You can't simply copy the iso to your flashdrive. Instead the actual windows disks use weird bootloader hacks that simply can't be used normally on a flashdrive.

Fortunately you have 3 options:

  1. Find a windows computer and download the media creation tool and use that with your flashdrive.

  2. Give up.

  3. Install WoeUSB and run that from linux/bsd with your iso and flashdrive. It creates a grub shim to launch the windows installer which is much more reliable than trying to use the windows bootloader.

sudo woeusb --target-filesystem NTFS -d windows10.iso /dev/sdb

password reset

  1. Create an ubuntu flashdrive, boot off it, mount the windows drive.
  2. Install chntpw
  3. Change into the directory containing Windows with the command cd /PATH/TO/WINDOWS
  4. Change into the Windows/System32/config directory.
  5. Issue the command sudo chntpw SAM.

You should now see the chntpw screen (Figure B). Here you have five options:

Clear user password
Edit user password
Promote user (make user an administrator)
Unlock and enable user account
Quit

UTC time fix

By default on windows it will read the hardware time as local time rather than the standard posix UTC value. This causes obvious issues when attempting to dual boot windows with pretty much any other operating system.

A registry value can be created in windows to force it to read the hardware clock as UTC.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation\RealTimeIsUniversal
DWORD (32-bit) Value = 1

However windows is very buggy so this solution sometimes will simply not work. If that is the case you can simply disable NTP in windows, manually set the time offset, and then rely on NTP in your other operating system to ensure a proper time and date.

virtual machine drivers

The drivers for gnome-boxes are on spice-space.org/download.html