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Comment by justsaysmthng | Hacker News Reader

That's really nice. I'll remember to use it whenever I need a linux box.

However, I'm not that interested in a zillion flavors of Linux.

I would be willing to pay for a box which comes with Windows and Visual Studio preinstalled (plus git, cmake, bash, etc):

In other words, an up to date development machine based on WinXP, Vista, 8, X, etc.

The main reason is that it takes hours if not an entire day to install all this stuff and run all the updates required to configure it.

As a Mac user writing cross platform C++, I sometimes need to test my app on various flavors of windows and compile the code on various flavors of compilers.

Keeping 30-50GB VM files ( for different versions of windows ) on my SSD is kind of wasteful, since I only need these boxes once every month or so..

I would easily part with $5 or $10 or even $20 (if it's very urgent) for an up-to-date box like that ..

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If it's worth that much money to you, how much of your time would you say?

The reason I ask is that Hashicorp's Packer[1] is awesome at doing things like that.

Personally, I have an automated Packer build that spins up Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, provisions it and installs all of the necessary software, and then preps it for Windows Deployment Services. I originally based the work off of packer-windows[2] but ended up re-rolling most of it again from scratch.

If you don't mind spending roughly a day or two figuring it out, then it's well worth it!

[1] https://www.packer.io/ [2] https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows

Yes, packer looks good. But it's a bit overkill for my use case and doesn't really solve the "time" issue (or does it?).

Somebody could use packer and publish the artifacts on a website, were I can download the desired image and have it running in 5 minutes. That's what I'd pay for.

Once you sink the time into setup, it really takes care of itself.

You could basically schedule/cron/whatever the job to build once a month/week/day on your machine and it will always dump the up-to-date virtual machine in the location you choose.

I should also point out that Packer is the program that they use to create Vagrant boxes.

Why not a VM hosted in Azure? Microsoft publishes VMs into the Azure marketplace with Visual Studio pre-installed.

Scott Hanselman has an older blog post [0] that describes how he does it with a Surface 2. With an official Remote Desktop client for Macs, it should be just as easy. As a bonus, you can run it on an A11 Standard (16 cores & 112 GB of memory), although I wouldn't want to leave it up for a month ($1200).

[0] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UsingASurface2RTARMToGetActual...

If you're the sort of person for whom cloud hosting works, that will work for you. I personally like things that run (a) when the net is off and (b) if the vendor decides they don't like me, but I accept that I'm a dinosaur.

But the main reason for wanting things local, for me, is that the sole reason I have a Windows VM is to plug various devices into it for which there's no software for OS X or Linux. Yes, there are hacky methods for some USB use cases, but I don't think having the logic controlling my laser cutter executing 12 hops away is going to go so well.

And as a non-mac user I would really appreciate a OS X VM. I know it's possible to build one but it's a lot of work.

>And as a non-mac user I would really appreciate a OS X VM.

AFAIK that is a no-no according to the EULA, at least that was the case a couple of years ago.

It's still the case, the VM has to run on Apple hardware.

It might LEGALLY have to run on Apple hardware, but it doesn't TECHNICALLY have to run on Apple hardware.

If you live in a locality where the Apple licensing terms binding VMs to only run on Apple hardware are not valid / enforceable, you can check this out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wodqGvug6e0

This (https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-osx-virtualbox-vm) works if you build it on a Mac... But yeah, not technically allowed to run on Windows, and you're also not allowed to host a prebuilt box for others according to the license with OS X.

https://atlas.hashicorp.com/jhcook/boxes/osx-yosemite-10.10

I got some of the way there with https://github.com/xdissent/ievms and https://github.com/xdissent/iectrl but I'd really like a way to provision things on to the VM once it's up and running. Windows seems to suffer from a historical lack of attention to automated provisioning.

Chef, Ansible, and I think even Puppet have varying levels of support for Windows provisioning.

Check out WinRM. You can manage every feature in 2012R2 through a remote Powershell session. Installing and uninstalling programs can be done this way.

Sysprep is Microsoft's System Preparation Tool for Microsoft Windows operating system deployment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysprep

Seriously. Especially now that VS is free-ish, this could be done much more easily (probably).

How many lawsuits would Microsoft face if they bundled VS in their OS, the way IE is bundled? Will they be accused of holding back developers because Eclipse isn't bundled?

For Windows devs looking for help setting up a new machine or a test VM, this can be automated using BoxStarter:

http://boxstarter.org/WebLauncher

What about doing it in the cloud? E.g. AWS instances which you create and only spin up when you need them...

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