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Virtual machines for CRIMPers
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 19, 2015 at 01:44 PM
I realise this is not directly relevant to outlining, but it is tangentially relevant.
Over the years, the forum has seen much grumbling about the fact you can get certain favourite progs/apps on one platform but not on another. And I’ve been one of the grumblers.
A couple of days ago, I had occasion to want to run Windows on my Mac. Yes, I know! But I had just acquired a rather fine text alignment tool (very useful for translators when you want to create “bitexts” out of source/target versions of a given text, i.e. align both languages side by side: the tool is AlignFactory Lite by Terminotix, for those who are interested. The AlignFactory series are by far the most powerful and intelligent alignment tools I’ve ever used, and also output a wide variety of formats, including HTML and XML).
Unfortunately, said alignment tool only runs on Windows. Did I want to open up one of my old Windows machines and install it? No. The very thought of the hours and hours of updates I would have to put up with…. ugh! Did I want to create a Bootcamp partition and run it on that? Nope, because then I’d have to fiddle about with cross-partition file access, a true PITA. Did I want to experiment with a virtual machine? No, because they’re memory-intensive, expensi… wait a minute, maybe they’re not!
So I downloaded a couple: a trial version of Parallels (quite expensive but supposedly very good), and VirtualBox (free from Oracle - who’d a thunk?)
In the end, I didn’t bother installing Parallels. VirtualBox has come on in leaps and bounds. And is perfect for Windows 10. I was already aware that Windows 10 was resource-efficient - my little HP x2 only has 2GB of RAM, but is quite sprightly. My MacBook only has 4GB of RAM (yes, a strategic mistake - I should have opted for 8GB). So I could only afford to allocate 1GB of RAM to the virtual machine. But it runs beautifully! So what’s to say:
a) VirtualBox for Mac is very easy to install; it’s also very easy to install Windows from an ISO disk image.
b) Not so easy to install (because difficult to find) are the Guest Additions, which you’ll need for the Really Cool functions described below. Actually, the disk image for Guest Additions is hidden in the application package itself - it’s easy enough to extract if you know that, but why the VirtualBox package doesn’t extract it automatically is beyond my ken.
c) The Really Cool functions include: cross-platform copy and paste (bidirectional, effortless, although there’s occasionally a slight lag); option to mount your Mac’s file system under Windows, where it becomes instantly and seamlessly accessible (basically, you can mount Mac folders - at any level - as permanent, mapped disk drives on your virtual PC, so they automatically mount as you load the virtual machine. File system access is handled invisibly by VirtualBox). I believe there are other options, including integrating VirtualBox into the Mac UI seamlessly, just like Parallels (which basically pretends Windows apps are part of your Mac setup), but I don’t need that particular luxury and suspect it would involve a memory hit in any case. Finally, it’s easy to mount CDs, DVDs and other optical drives.
d) Networking “just works”
e) USB devices “just work”
f) VirtualBox uses a “dynamic” hard drive; you set a limit, but you don’t have to dedicate actual hard disk space to the drive; it automatically grows up to the limit you imposed. Meaning I now have a full Windows VM running in about 5GB of space, although the nominal size of the disk drive is 32GB.
g) Of course you can run other virtual machines, too, such as Linux-based ones, or anything you like that runs on an Intel processor, really.
So I am now the proud owner of a virtual Windows machine that runs very nicely on my MacBook Air, despite the latter’s limited memory. It does have an impact; the memory pressure is reported as varying between 70% and 80%, which is quite high. But it runs very smoothly (so far, at any rate). No, I’m not getting rocket-like performance, but I’m not expecting it, either.
So I shall undoubtedly be installing a couple of my favourite Windows outliners in the not-too-distant future - there are a couple I still feel the occasional pang of nostalgia for (MyInfo, RightNote…).
Happy Christmas, is what I say!
Posted by Wayne K
Dec 19, 2015 at 08:26 PM
Sounds good. I think it’s very relevant but I’m more interested in going the other (running Mac programs on Windows). I haven’t been able to come up much. Three different Apple store advisers have told me there’s no way to do it other than buying a separate Mac and sharing the keyboard and monitor.
Does anyone know if it can be done with virtual software (or some other way)?
Wayne
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 19, 2015 at 09:48 PM
I would like too, so I checked the Virtual Box site, and apparently there is a way to get Mac running on the PC. I will be exploring it further.
Daly
Wayne K wrote:
Sounds good. I think it’s very relevant but I’m more interested in
>going the other (running Mac programs on Windows). I haven’t been able
>to come up much. Three different Apple store advisers have told me
>there’s no way to do it other than buying a separate Mac and sharing the
>keyboard and monitor.
>
>Does anyone know if it can be done with virtual software (or some other
>way)?
>
>Wayne
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 19, 2015 at 09:48 PM
I would like too, so I checked the Virtual Box site, and apparently there is a way to get Mac running on the PC. I will be exploring it further.
Daly
Wayne K wrote:
Sounds good. I think it’s very relevant but I’m more interested in
>going the other (running Mac programs on Windows). I haven’t been able
>to come up much. Three different Apple store advisers have told me
>there’s no way to do it other than buying a separate Mac and sharing the
>keyboard and monitor.
>
>Does anyone know if it can be done with virtual software (or some other
>way)?
>
>Wayne
Posted by jaslar
Dec 20, 2015 at 01:06 AM
I haven’t tried this yet, but it’s on the to do list.
http://www.macbreaker.com/2013/01/iatkos-ml2-mountain-lion-virtualbox.html - how to install from the distro
http://www.macbreaker.com/2013/01/install-mountain-lion-iatkos-ml2-hackintosh.html - how to setup the distro FROM a Mac