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Recommendations
Here is a collection of recommendations I have from experience, for those wanting to follow this path.
USB Ethernet Adapter
You will need this regardless if your laptop doesn't have one built in.
But even if yours does, having a separate USB one makes it really easy to just pass that ethernet adapter through to Virtual Machines, which is really nice when you need to do stuff on a Windows VM (see below) for example.
And just in general, being able to give a VM a direct network connection to the network can make some things a lot simpler.
Windows Virtual Machine
I recommend setting up a windows virtual machine and having it on-hand for course-work a few reasons
- The vast majority of software in the program works fine on Linux, but there is one or two one-off cases where that is not the case.
- If there is software needed that is not covered in this documentation and is not trivial to install in your situation, this just lets you use the windows instructions provided by your instructors in a pinch.
- In the same way Linux VMs are used in this program to practice tasks across Operating Systems, there are times when Windows specific tasks are done in class for practice/learning.
I have 2 main recommendations for doing this:
- Use Windows LTSC IoT
- It's a much smaller install size, which is nice for VMs
- None of the normal extra unneeded programs (bloat)
- TPM is not required, which requires some extra setup, see the TPM Section for virt-manager.
- Use Virtual Machine Manager
- Unlike VirtualBox or VMWare, it's fully open-source and uses KVM, which is native to Linux. So doesn't need extra kernel modules or any weird/extra install steps, and less likely to have issues.
Windows LTSC can be downloaded from here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc
Note: This is the "Evaluation" version, and you will need to "reactivate/reset" the activation after 90 days. The non-Evaluation version is not officially publicly available, so I will not link it here.
Check out the Virtual Machine Manager document for Install, setup and usage info.