Just an intro.

[Tony Baechler]

Interesting.  I know VMWare is non-free, so it isn't available in Debian.  I 
don't have X on any of my machines, so Orca currently isn't an option.  I 
have a Debian unstable and experimental install, but I also get a lot of 
errors and couldn't get speech with Gnome, so I gave up on it.  I'll have to 
start over with a new install one of these days.  My main desktop doesn't 
have hardware virtualization, so Windows would be very slow in a VM.  My 
server has KVM and supports hardware virtualization, but I never bothered to 
set up a Windows VM because it's primarily a server and I usually don't 
access it from the console.  I almost always access it with ssh and I don't 
think I could use Windows with speech over an ssh connection.  I definitely 
want to spend several days in Gnome learning Orca, Firefox, Thunderbird, 
etc.  By the way, there is something you can't do in a Windows VM.  That is 
installing BIOS updates.  Almost all of them require Windows to flash your 
BIOS firmware.  Obviously, a VM won't work for that.

On 3/23/2013 8:16 AM, Christopher Chaltain wrote:
> My set up is a bit different. Currently I'm running Ubuntu on my desktop
> system, and I bring Windows up in a virtual machine as necessary. I use
> VMware Player since it's GUI is accessible with Orca. This way, I don't have
> to reboot to switch between Windows and Linux. I run Linux as my host OS
> since that's the OS I spend most of my time in. I used to do it the other
> way, but once I got comfortable enough with Linux, I switched them around.
> Note, that my desktop system is set up to dual boot between Windows and
> Ubuntu, but I haven't booted it into Windows since that first weekend I got
> it two years ago. I haven't found there's anything I need to do in Windows I
> can't do in a virtual machine.
>
> I also use VMware Player to run newer versions of Ubuntu in a virtual
> machine as well. This gives me a chance to check things out before
> installing them as my host OS.