I’m a little out of the Virtual Machine game and Linx administration. I think a large part of that has to do with my last two jobs being managerial. I haven’t really needed to build new systems as much; I’ve just been upgrading. Or building headless systems on Raspberry Pis.

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently needed to build a Flare VM. The first attempt was on my daily driver, a Windows 10 desktop that had been upgraded to a Windows 11 desktop. I installed the Windows 10 VM, and it was just horrible to use after installation—really slow and buggy. I built the image multiple times.

A while back, Active Countermeasures did an Expand your Home lab with Proxmox webinar. I took my old ESXi server, which I hadn’t used in years, and installed Proxmox on it. It’s a pretty cool tool. I built one of the Flare VMs I set up on it.

A few months ago, I got a bunch of Microcenter 16GB USB drives through Amazon. Before using them, I wanted to check them all to make sure I wasn’t getting things nasty. If you followed me on social media sites, you know why I was posting pictures of Kali DVDs now. Unfortunately, doing everything to test those drives messed up the Xubuntu build on my laptop. It messed up the UEFI settings, and it couldn’t see my hard drive for a bit. I got it back to seeing the hard drive but couldn’t get it to boot. So I re-installed it using Debian Bookworm.

Today, the day I wrote the blog post, I installed VirtualBox on the device to install Flare Vm (yeah, today is the same day as the last blog post). Debian’s stable branch doesn’t come with VirtualBox, so I got the installer from Oracle. After a bit of install dependency hell with VirtualBox and not having the Linux headers on the laptop, I got VirtualBox running.

When I went to install Windows, though, I kept getting errors about Virtualbox not being able to run in root KVM mode and removing the KVM package from the headers. It turns out that since the last time I installed Linux on the laptop, Debian has been installing KVM and Qemu on their devices, which is the same tool that Proxmox appears to be using. So even though I got VirtualBox going by  using:

I’m going to remove VirtualBox and spend the time figuring out how to use kvm-virt, qemu, and virt-manager. They seem to be taking over, and I want to see if they do a better job of running Windows than VirtualBox did. Because even on the laptop, it was still a little slow. However, on Proxmox, it ran pretty well, and the Proxmox server is older than the laptop.