dudeitssm

Installing Windows 10 to an external drive without a Windows host

The long story

We were talking at the office about having a LAN Party and playing some old school games like Age of Empires and Starcraft. The issue is that I have Linux installed. I didn't want to ruin everyone else's fun by having random crashes, out-of-sync errors and similar stuff using Wine, and I didn't want to do the dual boot dance, so I figured out that the best option was to install Windows to an external drive.

Abstract

This is a full guide for people who wanted to setup Windows 10/11 VM with QEMU/KVM hypervisor for laptops that configured with hybrid graphics card like Intel/AMD + NVIDIA. This process will take about 1 to 2 hours, depending on your system's performance.

Before we proceed:

This guide is exclusively for Fedora because this distro is quite different to set up than other distro such as Arch. I would say Arch is easier to setup than Fedora, but sometimes your prefer Fedora than Arch in terms of its usage & features.
This tutorial mostly focus on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus MUXed configuration when dGPU (dedicated GPU) can connect directly to HDMI/DP output. If in doubt, search "VR-Ready laptops", as those are definitely MUXed.
For MUXless configuration which the dGPU share display alongside with iGPU (integrated GPU), you may need to extract your system's vBIOS for your card to avoid getting no output from your screen. Refer [here](#blank-screen-output-when-i-passthrough

File Transfer Over Serial Console With GNU Screen And lrzsz / rz / sz

Description

It is possible to transfer files over serial console when access through the network is unavailable, using the lrzsz suite.

For example, we can upload or download firmware, backups and configuration files to an OpenWRT device over a serial console.

	KEYMAPOPTS="us us"
	HOSTNAMEOPTS="-n alpine"
	INTERFACESOPTS="auto lo
	iface lo inet loopback

	auto eth0
	iface eth0 inet dhcp
	hostname alpine
	"
	TIMEZONEOPTS="-z UTC"