How to set up a Virtual Machine environment to run Daedalus or perform tests for Windows 10 environments.
Don't.
We recommend installing a pre-built Virtual Machine on your local machine. These are provided by Microsoft.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
Note that these VMs have 90 day limits, so it is sensible not to over-customise them! We recommend using VirtualBox, which is free, and available for Windows, MacOSX, Linux and other platforms.
Just install VirtualBox, open the Windows 10 VM file that you have downloaded from Microsoft and after a while (about 10 minutes on my laptop) your Windows VM should be ready to use. If you can't automatically open the VM file by e.g. double clicking it, the "Add Appliance" menu item does the same thing. Having added the appliance, start the Virtual Machine using the button and log in when prompted. The Microsoft VM comes preinstalled with one user (IEUser), with a standard password Passw0rd!
You will probably want to "Insert the Guest Additions CD" so that you can integrate the VM better with your host machine (the actual desktop/laptop etc.). This allows you to share devices, file systems, cut/paste between the VM and the host etc. This is a virtual CD that should automatically run.
Once you have logged in, type command into the Windows 10 search box, open up the
Command Prompt application, and type slmgr/ato after the prompt to activate the system for 90 days.
Assuming you are connected to the internet, you will see a response that activation has been successful.
You can then download the Windows version of Daedalus from
https://daedaluswallet.io/#download
using the Microsoft Edge browser, and then install, test and run it in the same way as a normal Windows user. Take care to keep up to date with all security updates, and be careful about giving the VM access to your host file system. You are running a live Windows machine that is connected to the Internet!
You can run the Virtual Machine as a Window on your host, or in full-screen mode. In the latter, your screen will look exactly as it would if you were running Windows 10 natively and the normal operating system menus etc. will be hidden. If you do this, make sure you note down how to stop the Virtual Machine when you need to, otherwise you could get stuck and have to reboot your system!
If you prefer, you can instead download an official Windows 10 ISO image for testing purposes and create your own Virtual Machine. There is no need to activate Windows in this case - the system will just nag you occasionally. The installation will not time out, but it does take more effort to set up, so is only recommended if you are familiar with using VirtualBox. This does give more choice about the Windows 10 edition (Pro, Pro N etc.), allows you to set up your own user names, and doesn't seem to be as restricted as the official Windows VM, so you may find it more useful if you are a developer. Note that we have had reports that the system will restart itself every day if it is installed this way.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10ISO
If you call the Virtual Machine Windows 10, VirtualBox will automatically set up the parameters correctly for you.
You can provision GHC and other tools using the following Powershell script.
https://github.com/input-output-hk/ouroboros-network/blob/master/scripts/install.ps1
Github doesn't make downloads easy, unfortunately. You may want to install Github Desktop to be able to download and run this script. Once downloaded, right-click on it and run it in Powershell. You do want to change the Execution Policy to allow this when prompted.
This will install chocolatey and then Cabal and GHC. You can run cabal/ghc from the Command Prompt.
There is a guide here on how to install GHC using chocolately:
https://hub.zhox.com/posts/introducing-haskell-dev/
This is writtem by Tamar (who maintains the chocolatey ghc package)
If you are a bash user, you may find it useful to install the Windows Subsytem for Linux (WSL). Type "install windows subsystem for linux" into the Windows search box and follow the instructions. I haven't yet figured out how to do this with the Microsoft pre-configured VM. I think you probably need to download some other things first...
You can find the cardano-node executables on Hydra. The download includes cardano-node.exe and a .dll. To run the node with cardano-node run you need to reference a few files and directories as arguments. These can be copied from the cardano-node repo into the executables directory. The command to run the node on mainnet looks like this:
cardano-node.exe run --topology ./mainnet-topology.json --database-path ./state --genesis-file ./mainnet-genesis.json --genesis-hash 5f20df933584822601f9e3f8c024eb5eb252fe8cefb24d1317dc3d432e940ebb --port 3001 --config ./configuration-mainnet.yaml --socket-path ./socket/mainnet-socket