this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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My mother uses some software that runs in the browser for her shop. It can print out receipts and scan items. To do these things it has a small "sattelite" application that runs on the system and interacts with the printer and scanner. This software only runs on Windows and Linux doesn't have drivers for the scanner.
When I switched her over to Linux and found this out in the process I wanted to stop, give up and install windows.
But then I had a stupid idea. I could run the sattelite program in a Windows VM and pass through the USB devices for receipt printer and scanner. The webapp uses requests to localhost:9998 to communicate with the sattelite so I set up a apache server that proxies these requests into the VM. I also prevented the VM from acessing the Interner so Windows doesn't update and screw everything up.
And it works. It has been in use for a week now and I've heard no complaints. I'm just praying to god it doesn't break
At least getting a snapshot of the Windows VM should be simple. And since it doesn’t connect to the internet and doesn’t update, restore should be quick and relatively easy.
I wonder if the windows docker image could be of use?
Is there such a thing as a windows docker image that doesn't run Linux on Windows?
I saw a reference to it the other day but didn't look further, it looks like the windows docker image can only run as athe same os as the base release
Ah right, useless.