Windows from Linux (1)

Windows from Linux

There are few ways to access Windows resources.

Install Microsoft Windows into a disk partition and make it dual-bootable.
Use Windows 365 to use it from web browsers
Run Office 365 application in Wine
Other tips

Dual boot Windows installation from Linux

Creation of Windows USB installation media on GNU + Linux platform can be automated by using https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB.

Let’s see what is involved behind “Windows from Linux” as below.

Information on Windows installation

The official Microsoft documentation gives us good entry points:

You should probably get your localized Windows 10 pro image for Windows 10 (Not Windows 10N nor Windows 10KN. These are for people living in Europe or South Korea).

Available GNU + Linux tools for Windows installation

Useful tools on Debian to manipulate disk data:

gdisk – GPT fdisk text-mode partitioning tool (with in place conversion of MBR to GPT)
parted – disk partition manipulator (CLI)
gparted – GNOME partition editor (GUI)
msb – Master Boot Record for IBM-PC compatible computers
wimtools – Tools for manipulating Windows Imaging files

How to create a USB flash drive to install Windows

The recent Windows ISO image contains sources/install.wim which is about 5GiB and exceeds 4 GiB filesize limit on FAT32 frequently used on the USB flash disk.

Although the disk image is called “ISO file”, this is not formatted in ISO9660 but actually formatted in UDF format which doesn’t suffer from 4GB file size limitation. This “ISO file” isn’t a hybrid file system overlaying harddisk file system so you can’t use this ISO image with simple “dd if= ...” to make bootable USB key (I know many of us Linux user feel like doing it.)

So we need to cope with this complication.

The following can make a USB flash drive to install Windows via UEFI on GPT disk.

Download Windows 10 install media as ISO image
Mount ISO image and make its contents accessible
Format USB flash drive with FAT32 filesystem on the first partition of GPT disk.
Copy everything in the ISO image to USB flash drive
- split sources/install.wim using wimsplit (equivalently wimlib-imagex split) into parts to cope with the 4GiB filesize limit

If the install.wim is slightly larger than 4GB limit, you may use file compression with wimlib-imagex optimize install.wim --solid to make it fit in 4GB limit and do without using split, instead.

If the UEFI available on your system also supports NTFS or the UEFI:NTFS is used along with the UEFI, you can format USB flash drive with NTFS filesystem instead and boot Windows by copying the original sources/install.wim into this NTFS filesystem without splitting it.

You may also make this USB flash drive as Legacy/UEFI hybrid boot disk using the standard tricks.

Windows 365 from web browsers

If you have an account of Windows 365, you can access windows resources from chrome-compatible browsers using https://www.office.com (after login).

In order to make this work smoothly, I needed to adjust my cookie policy.

Click Settings on the pull-down menu opened from the top bar
Click Settings on left top corner of the opened dialog
Click Privacy and security in the pull-down menu
Click Cookies and other site data to open a dialog
Verify General settings to be Block third-party cookies
Scroll down to Customized behaviors
Click Add button on the right of Sites that can always use cookies
Add URL: https://teams.microsoft.com (Including third-party cookies on this site)

(I see that the Paypal transaction needed similar configuration on https://www.paypal.com:443 .)

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Date: 2023/02/13 (initial publish), 2023/06/04 (last update)

Source: en/note-00035.md

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