Some applications (such as GemStone/S 64 Bit) are not available as native Windows applications but are available as Linux applications. Fortunately, Microsoft includes Hyper-V on many versions of Windows 10 which allows you to run Linux as a guest operating system on your Windows (host) operating system. This blog post (along with an accompanying 2-minute video) describes how to set that up. See the image gallery below for screen shots of each step.

Enable Hyper-V

  • Click the Start menu select Settings
  • In the search field type “Hyper”
  • Select “Turn Windows features on or off”
  • Check the box for “Hyper-V” (If you get a block instead of a checkmark, then your environment does not fully support virtualization)
  • Click “Restart now”

Create an Ubuntu Virtual Machine

  • In the Windows task bar search field, type “Hyper”
  • Open the Hyper-V Manager
  • In the tree view in the left pane, select your local Windows machine
  • Click “Quick Create…”
  • Select an Ubuntu operating system
  • When the virtual machine is successfully created, click “Connect” then “Start”

Setup and Update Ubuntu

  • When Ubuntu starts, press any key in response to the “Press any key to continue…” prompt
  • Select your language, keyboard, and location
  • Provide your name, a host name for the Ubuntu OS, an account username, and a password (leave “Require my password to log in” selected)
  • Once that process finishes, you will need to reconnect to the guest OS
  • Login to Linux (using Xorg) with the username and password you created earlier
  • Right-click on the desktop to get a context menu and select “Open Terminal”
  • To update your Ubuntu OS, repeat the following series of commands until they show no changes:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove