where to download Windows that works with Mac Silicon?

[blaHBLAHB]

Hello all,

I installed VMWare Fusion 13 on my M1 Mac (OS Ventura), and then downloaded a Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft. I created a new virtual machine using it, but when I ran it, Fusion said "This virtual machine cannot be powered on because it requires the X86 machine architecture, which is incompatible with this Arm machine architecture host." Did I download the wrong version of Windows? Where can I get the correct one?

[ColoradoMarmot]

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Fusion-Documents/The-Unofficial-Fusion-13-for-Apple-Silicon...

That has all the information you need.  I'd recommend not using the insider build with the vhdx.

[Technogeezer]

You need an ARM version of Windows to run as a VM on Apple Silicon Macs. The only ISOs that Microsoft officially releases for download are for 64-bit Intel CPUs (x64/x86_64).

But you're not out of luck. Check out the Unofficial Fusion 13 for Apple Silicon Companion Guide. It’s full of tips that will help you get the most out of Fusion 13, including how to get Windows 11 ARM.

[blaHBLAHB]

Thank you. Reading through that, it looks waaay too complicated for a home user like me. I going to buy Parallels. I can't believe I paid over $100 dollars for Fusion only to be forced to do sysadmin type stuff. I just want to use Quicken on my Mac..

[ColoradoMarmot]

It's actually not too bad, but yeah, it's not as seamless as Parallels process is.  Hopefully with the announcement today, Microsoft will start making ARM ISO's available directly and solve all this nonsense.

FWIW, Fusion is free for personal use.

[RDPetruska]

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@blaHBLAHB wrote:

. I can't believe I paid over $100 dollars for Fusion only to be forced to do sysadmin type stuff. 

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That's why VMware offers 30-day trial versions of their products, so you can try them out before you buy them!

[blaHBLAHB]

Okay everybody, after spending two hours trying unsuccessfully to contact someone at VMWare, I figured I might as well take the plunge and try the procedure outlined in that document. I installed all the packages, downloaded the script, and ran it. The script seems to have successfully downloaded all the components, but then it quit with this error:

CAB -> ESD: Microsoft-Windows-LanguageFeatures-Speech-en-us-Package-arm64
Failed to extract Microsoft-Windows-LanguageFeatures-Speech-en-us-Package-arm64.cab

I definitely installed the cab extracting package. Any idea what the problem might be?

[Technogeezer]

I just think I've figured out what the issue is with the "failed to extract". I was able to reproduce this with a fresh macOS installation and the latest packages from Homebrew.

The culprit appears to be the cabextract utility. The cabextract utility has been very recently been updated from its authors and from Homebrew (like within the last couple of weeks). This updated version no longer appears to work correctly to extract the files from the download cab files from Microsoft. The older version works fine.   

TL;DR

Homebrew now provides version 1.10 of the cabextract. This version appears to be broken, at least on macOS, and at least for use by the UUP conversion process. The 1.9.1 version that was available before they made the recent changes does work. However, this version no longer appears to be available from Homebrew.

I've found 2 workarounds:

• If you're using MacPorts, it still has the 1.9.1 version of cabextract available. Use the procedure in the Companion Guide to install all of the utilities from MacPorts.
• If you're using Homebrew, download the sources for cabextract 1.9.1 from cabextract 1.9.1 source code, build it, and replace the version of cabextract that Homebrew installed.

You already have all the Xcode command line utilities you'll need installed - you needed them for Homebrew. Here's a cheat sheet on how to build that old version once you get the source code tar file downloaded.

The cabextract source files are a .tar.gz file named cabextract-1.9.1.tar.gz . Use the following commands to build and install the old cabextract utility that works from these sources:

tar xvfz cabextract-1.9.1.tar.gz
cd cabextract-1.9.1
./configure
make
mv /opt/homebrew/bin/cabextract /opt/homebrew/bin/cabextract-1.10
cp cabextract /opt/homebrew/bin
chmod 555 /opt/homebrew/bin/cabextract

You can verify that the old version of cabextract is installed with the following command:

cabextract -v

It should reply with

cabextract version 1.9.1

If the conversion failed with this issue, you can restart the conversion once you have built and installed the 1.9.1 version of cabextract. cd  back to the directory where the uup_download_macos.sh script resides, and type the following command:

./files/convert.sh

[ColoradoMarmot]

VERY nice catch!

Hopefully this all goes away soon, and either MSFT provides real ISO's or Fusion follows in Parallels footsteps with an easier download.

I'm glad I built and kept a 'fresh' vm copy a while back though....jumping through these hoops is getting old.  Now if we can just keep ubuntu from messing things up too

[Technogeezer]

Just an update:

I decided to dust off some old coding skills and learned some new skills for using Xcode so I could debug where the new version went wrong.

There is indeed a bug in the latest 1.10 version of cabextract where a change to support some new functionality broke the ability to create folders when it needs to during cab file extracts.  That's what caused the "file not found" error - it was trying to write a file into a directory that didn't exist.

The developer also seems to have found this bug, and has checked in a fix to the development version of the source. I implemented the proposed fix on my copy of the 1.10 sources, and it does indeed fix the issue.

Now all we have to do is wait for the developer to release the fix and for Homebrew to pick it up.

[Technogeezer]

Another update. The cabextract author has released version 1.11 that fixes the issue introduced in 1.10. This version is now available from Homebrew.

If you installed the workaround of building version 1.9.1 from source, remove the copy of cabextract that you installed:

sudo rm /opt/homebrew/bin/cabextract /opt/homebrew/share/man/man1/cabextract.1

Then reinstall cabextract from Homebrew to obtain the new 1.11 version.

brew install cabextract