I’ve written a few times here about virtual machines. VMWare has just added a new entry into the tools available with a technical preview for VMWare Fusion running on Apple silicon hardware. Full details and a download are available in this blog post.
So far my trial of the preview has been quite successful. The software itself works for me as well as it has on Intel-based Macs with VoiceOver. Creating VMs, management of the machines and the other tasks you would want to do are all working well.
The preview doesn’t seem to support automatic OS install so when installing an OS on a virtual machine, you’ll need to go through a manual install. I had no issues doing this with two different Linux distributions and have them working with both speech and braille and the Orca screen reader.
Given Orca, like many other screen readers, uses the caps lock key as a screen reader key, you’ll want to use VMWare preferences to assign another key as caps lock. I personally assign the accent key on the top left of the keyboard as this key and it works great.
As far as I know, there is not a Windows ISO one can use here. If I find differently, I’ll update but based on what the Windows Insider pages say, I think Windows for ARM isn’t available for this sort of a scenario.
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