windows

94 Articles

Linux Fu: Windows Virtualization The Hard(ware) Way

August 21, 2025 by 31 Comments

As much as I love Linux, there are always one or two apps that I simply have to run under Windows for whatever reason. Sure, you can use wine, Crossover Office, or run Windows in a virtual machine, but it’s clunky, and I’m always fiddling with it to get it working right. But I recently came across something that — when used improperly — makes life pretty easy. Instead of virtualizing Windows or emulating it, I threw hardware at it, and it works surprisingly well.

Once Upon a Time

First, a story. Someone gave me a Surface Laptop 2 that was apparently dead. It wouldn’t charge, and you can’t remove the keyboard without power. Actually, you can with a paper clip, and I suggested pulling it to see if the screen would charge by itself. They said they had already bought a new computer, so they didn’t care.

Unsurprisingly, once I popped the keyboard off, the computer charged and was fine. You just have to replace the keyboard or use another one. Or use it as a tablet, which it is set up for anyway. But I have plenty of laptops and computers of every description. What was I going to do with this nice but keyboardless computer? Continue reading “Linux Fu: Windows Virtualization The Hard(ware) Way” →

My Winter Of ’99: The Year Of The Linux Desktop Is Always Next Year

June 3, 2025 by 229 Comments

Growing up as a kid in the 1990s was an almost magical time. We had the best game consoles, increasingly faster computers at a pace not seen before, the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web, as well the best fashion and styles possible between neon and pastel colors, translucent plastic and also this little thing called Windows 95 that’d take the world by storm.

Yet as great as Windows 95 and its successor Windows 98 were, you had to be one of the lucky folks who ended up with a stable Windows 9x installation. The prebuilt (Daewoo) Intel Celeron 400 rig with 64 MB SDRAM that I had splurged on with money earned from summer jobs was not one of those lucky systems, resulting in regular Windows reinstalls.

As a relatively nerdy individual, I was aware of this little community-built operating system called ‘Linux’, with the online forums and the Dutch PC magazine that I read convincing me that it would be a superior alternative to this unstable ‘M$’ Windows 98 SE mess that I was dealing with. Thus it was in the Year of the Linux Desktop (1999) that I went into a computer store and bought a boxed disc set of SuSE 6.3 with included manual.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Windows is installed on all my primary desktop systems, raising the question of what went wrong in ’99. Wasn’t Linux the future of desktop operating systems?

Continue reading “My Winter Of ’99: The Year Of The Linux Desktop Is Always Next Year” →

Windows On ARM On Arm

April 10, 2025 by 12 Comments

While some companies like Apple have gone all-in on the ARM architecture, others are more hesitant to dive into the deep end. For example, Microsoft remains heavily invested in the x86 architecture and although it does have some ARM offerings, a lot of them feel a bit half-baked. So you might question why someone like [Gustave] has spent so much time getting Windows to run on unusual ARM platforms. But we don’t need much of a reason to do something off-the-wall like that around these parts, so take a look at his efforts to get Windows for ARM running on a smartwatch.

The smartwatch in question here is a Pixel Watch 3, which normally runs a closed-source Android implementation called Wear OS. The bootloader can be unlocked, so [Gustave] took that approach to implement a few clever workarounds to get Windows to boot including adding UEFI to the watch. During the process Google updated these devices to Android 15, though, which broke some of these workarounds. The solution at that point was to fake a kernel header and re-implement UEFI and then load Windows (technically Windows PE) onto the watch.

Although this project was released on April 1, and is by [Gustave]’s own admission fairly ridiculous and not something he actually recommends anyone do, he does claim that it’s real and provides everything needed for others to run Windows on their smartwatches if they want to. Perhaps one of our readers will be brave enough to reproduce the results and post about it in the comments. In the meantime, there are a few more open options for smartwatches available if you’re looking for something to tinker with instead.

Thanks to [Ruhan] for the tip!

Freeing Windows

March 10, 2025 by 62 Comments

There have been several attempts to make an unencumbered version of Windows. ReactOS is perhaps the best-known. You could also argue that Wine and its progeny, while not operating systems in the strictest sense of the word, might be the most successful. Joining the fray is Free95, a GPL-3.0 system that, currently, can run simple Windows programs. The developer promises to push to even higher compatibility.

As you might expect, the GitHub site is calling for contributors. There will be a lot to do. The src subdirectory has a number of files, but when you consider the sheer volume of stuff crammed into Windows, it is just a minimal start.

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Thirty Years Later, The Windows 3.1 Video Driver You Needed

January 6, 2025 by 52 Comments

Over the course of the 1990s we saw huge developments in the world of PC graphics cards, going from little more than the original IBM VGA standard through super VGA and then so-called “Windows accelerator” cards which brought the kind of hardware acceleration the console and 16 bit home computer users had been used to for a while. At the end of the decade we had the first generation of 3D accelerator chipsets which are ancestors of today’s GPUs.

It was a great time to be a hardware enthusiast, but as anyone who was around at the time will tell you, the software for the drivers hadn’t caught up. Particularly for Windows 3.1 it could be something of a lottery, so [PluMGMK]’s modern generic SVGA driver could have been extremely useful had it appeared at the time.

As many of you will be aware, there is a set of VESA standardized BIOS extensions for video modes. There were generic VESA drivers back in the day, but they would only provide a disappointing selection of options for what the cards could do even then. The new driver provides support for all the available modes supported by a card, at all color depths. Windows 3.1 in true-color full HD? No problem!

It’s unexpected to see Program Manager and a selection of windows spread across so much real-estate, almost reminiscent of the uncluttered desktops from early ’90s workstations if you disregard the bright colors. We can’t help noticing it wins in one way over even the latest version of MacOS at these resolutions though, as anyone who has ever used a 4K screen on a Mac and found the menus remain miles away up in the top corner will tell you. Meanwhile if you’ve not had your fill of 16-bit Windows, how about sticking it in a ThinkPad BIOS?

Reverse Engineering A Keyboard Driver Uncovers A Self-Destruct Code

September 19, 2024 by 23 Comments

Should you be able to brick a keyboard just by writing a driver to flash the lights on it? We don’t think so either. [TheNotary] got quite the shock when embarking on a seemingly straightforward project to learn C++ on the x86-64 architecture with Windows and sent it straight to Silicon Heaven with only a few seemingly innocent USB packets.

The project was a custom driver for the XVX S-K80 mechanical keyboard, aiming to flash LED patterns across the key LEDs and perhaps send custom images to the integrated LCD. When doing this sort of work, the first thing you need is the documentation of the communications protocols. Obviously, this was not an option with a closed-source project, so the next best thing is to spy on the existing Windows drivers and see how they worked. Using Wireshark to monitor the USB traffic whilst twiddling with the colour settings, it was clear that communications were purely over HID messages, simplifying subsequent analysis. Next, they used x32dbg (now x64dbg, but whatever) to attach to the existing driver process and trap a few interesting Windows system calls. After reading around the Windows API, a few candidate functions were identified and trapped. This gave them enough information to begin writing code to reproduce this behaviour. Then things got a bit odd.

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This Windows Installer Installs Linux

May 5, 2024 by 15 Comments

It may be a very long time since some readers have installed a copy of Windows, but it appears at one point during the installation there’s a step that asks you which OS version you would like to install. Normally this is populated by whichever Windows flavours come on the install medium, but [Naman Sood] has other ideas. How about a Windows installer with Alpine Linux as one of the choices? Sounds good to us.

You can see it in action in the video below the break. Indeed Alpine Linux appears as one of the choices, followed by the normal Windows licence accept screen featuring the GPL instead of any MS text. The rest of the installer talks about installing Windows, but we can forgive it not expecting a Linux install instead.

So, the question we’re all asking is: how is it done? The answer lies in a WIM file, a stock Windows image which the installer unpacks onto your hard drive. The Linux distro needs to be installable onto an NTFS root partition, and to make it installable there’s a trick involving the Windows pre-installation environment.

This is an amusing hack, but the guide admits it’s fragile and perhaps not the most useful. Even so, the sight of Linux in a Windows installer has to be worth it.

Continue reading “This Windows Installer Installs Linux” →