Back story: I have finally successfully installed Zorin OS and love it! However, I want to install Windows 11 as a virtual machine because I don't want to use PyCharm on an emulator and PyCharm community edition will not let me download (it appears it is not compatible with Zorin OS). There are also likely a few things on windows I will need to use in the future. As much as I don't want to move to Windows 11, there's no point in trying to stay on Windows 10 because Microsoft support for Windows 10 security updates is ending later this year (unless you want to pay for them for another year or two, which I don't.)
My point is I don't want to use Wine to be able to run PyCharm. Ok so here's the deal. I followed very thorough instructions from someone else on this site (thank you very much!) to install Windows 11 on a virtual machine using virtual machine manager etc. First time I didn't customize the configuration and it gave an error: "No bootable option or device was found."
I then reread the instructions fully, and was able to get to the part where Windows was setting up the VM. However, that process ended when it told me that the machine does not meet the system requirements. (See aka.ms/WindowsSysReq) My laptop meets all of those requirements (It is a Lenovo Legion), but to fix the above error, I had to select "BIOS" instead of "UEFI" for the boot firmware. It seems like I'm at a stalemate since Windows 11 says they require UEFI. Is there anything I can do other than attempting to reinstall Windows as a dual boot setup? (which I'm not opposed to but not terribly thrilled to do.)
Well I recently managed to install Windows 11 using virt-manager, but not sure if that is because my ASUS motherboards BIOS got updated to include Windows 11 support. I ditched it after the nag screens to fork out £211 for a licence! I downloaded the Windows 11 .iso, chose the Pro option using Ventoy as the source for the VM.
Can you share the link to the instructions you've followed?
They do advertise support for Linux, although they are providing the package in an archive form. This simply means a few more hoops to jump through to get it setup, but it should work. What have you tried?
My apologies, I meant to link it but forgot to come back to it. I thought it was just a reply to a topic but it looks like it is also a tutorial:
As for Pycharm, I just went to the official pycharm site and tried to download the community version but the button was disabled. It said the only Linux flavors it supports are the latest 2 versions of Ubuntu LTS and Fedora that support Gnome and KDE.
Disclaimer: I generally do not condone editing Windows registry but in this case, SecureBoot is not something that is in my threat model and therefore it is not important to me. I was able to successfully install windows by following the above-mentioned tutorial but also followed other instructions from somewhere else (I can't remember which video I got this from) that mentioned changing configuration settings before install:
On the last screen before it creates the install, check the box that says
In Overview section, select UEFI if it isn't already selected.
In the TPM section at the bottom, select Advanced options, then set Model to TIS and Version to 2.0. I have seen others using other flavors of Linux and other settings and still were successful, but this is what I did.
Bottom line is I'm sharing what worked for me, but anyone who isn't sure of themselves probably shouldn't take my word for it. Make sure you understand what you're doing before you do it.
The other part I added was from Gary Newell here:
The only step from this video that I stole is around 4:30, where he says to hit Shift+F10, type regedit in the console, and then create a new registry key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup called LabConfig. Then he said to create two new DWORD (32-bit) values called BypassTPMCheck and BypassSecureBootCheck, setting each value to 1. I only needed to do the second one as I had previously followed the first tutorial's instructions to set the TPM settings in virt-manager.
As I said before, I do not recommend registry editing in general, but this did work for me and I'm not concerned about physical security of this laptop due to other measures I have in place.
