Running in a VM

General
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Does anyone run bluefin in a VM on Windows? I’m stuck with Windows at work. I can’t get it to boot in hyperv at all. It went black after an update in VMware workstation. And virtual box can’t be used with guest additions without worrying about Oracles lawyers.

I’m interested in daily driving, but it’ll have to be in a vm.

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2

If you put Bluefin installer on a usb drive that can be marked Offline (so not a usb stick or thumbdrive) and add that as a Hard Drive within hyper-v settings it might work - Redirect USB Device To Virtual Machine Using Hyper-V As Host - Super User.

You can find out if the USB is offline-able from Admin prompt faster than using Computer Management in my experience:

diskpart
list disk
select disk {# of the USB drive}
offline disk
3

This worked for me:

  1. Hyper-v >> create new vm >> accept wizard defaults, except place .vhdx into c:\vols instead of buried in user profile

  2. Use Disk2vhd utility from Windows Sysinternals to convert the usb stick to .vhdx , and then add that as a Hard Disk to the vm using Hyper-V.

  3. In vm settings:

  • Remove Network Adapter (for now, re-add later, prevents trying to PXE boot)
  • disable Secure Boot (cures “SCSI Disk (0,0) the signed images hash is not allowed” error)

  1. Start VM. The bluefin boot prompt showed up >> accept wizard defaults >> install

  2. Turn off VM >> Enable Network >> restart

  3. “Perform MOK Managemant” text prompt >> Enroll MOK >> password universalblue >> reboot

A tasteful dinosaur artwork background is seen, followed eventually by “Welcome to Bluefin-dx 40” setup wizard.

On my laptop the VM is sluggish, but workable. I only have 16GB of memory which is 85% consumed, with only 4GB is allocated to the VM. CPU below 10%.

Mouse works, including scroll-wheel, but the pointer is not visible.

Open a terminal with ctrl-alt-T and all standard linux cli tools work.

On my machine the network is up and has an IP address that agrees with the host settings, but nslookup, ping etc. fail. (Windows host: Get-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName "Bluefin-dx" | Format-List and VM ip addr match).

This might be something peculiar to my machine though. (The reason I’m looking at hyper-v at all right now is because WSL networking is broken after a Windows Update.)

Broken network aside, I have a working Bluefin-dx VM on Windows 11:

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