Well not really - but I have your attention now… So in my last post, I talked about moving my home computer from Win 7 to Linux Mint KDE. That went ok for the most part other than some minor issues.
Fast-forward a day and I hit my first user issue :)… wife’s workplace has some video content that is distributed as DRM protected swf files that wil play only through a player called HaiHaiSoft player!
Options
-
Boot into windows - painful and slow and kills everyone’s else session.
-
Wine - Thought it’d be worth a try - installed Wine and dependencies through Synaptic. As expected, it would’nt run haiHaiSoft player - crashed aat launch.
-
Virtualization: so the final option was a VM through virtualbox. Installed Virtualbox and its dependencies (dkms, guest additions etc) and brought out my Win 7 install disk from cold storage.
Virtualbox and Windows VM installation
Went through installation and got Windows up and running. Once I got the OS installed, also installed guest additions and it runs surprisingly well. I’d only used Virtualbox for a linux guest from a Windows host before so it was a nice change to see how it worked the other way around.
Anyway, once the VM was installed, downloaded and installed the player and put a shortcut to virtualbox on the desktop. Problem solved!