Question of availability of emulator of earlier version of Ubuntu

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Bret Busby wrote:

>My wife has a computer that has Ubuntu 12.04 installed on it.
>
>She will not upgrade the operating system, because she has an
>application on it, that runs on 12.04, and not on later versions.

Hopefully that computer isn't hooked up to the internet, because
that's no longer supported, so it's not getting security updates.

>So, I am wondering whether an emulator is available, for 20.04, or,
>better, for 21.04, that will emulate 12.04, to allow applications
>that will not run on versions later than 12.04, to run on it.

You can use VirtualBox to provide that environment. With that, you
can launch pretty much any ISO in a virtual machine and boot into it
from within your current operating system. As above, though, I'd
recommend setting up that particular virtual machine to not have
internet access.

Also, with VirtualBox, the virtual machines are set up by default to
be pretty much isolated from your host operating system, but your
wife could change its settings so that she can pass data back and
forth between the virtual machine and her host computer in case she
needs to interact with it more extensively.

Do you mind sharing the name of the application? Perhaps one or more
of us can come up with either some alternatives your wife hasn't yet
considered or a way to get it to run in a current version of Ubuntu.

I feel your wife's pain. I've lost a couple of beloved pieces of
software over the years as a result of the changes that inevitably
occur with upgrades and with developers moving on and away from their
projects and I've occasionally considered doing what your wife is
doing in order to keep them. In the end, though, I always took the
losses.

I'm currently experiencing the wrenching frustration of switching to
the latest LTS without a particular program I currently use and rely
on several times per day (Task Coach), but which is no longer in the
Ubuntu repositories for the current LTS and can only be had via PPA
or in one of those portable software formats that are trending
nowadays, neither of which is ideal for me. Not only that, but
although there are a few somewhat similar programs, none of them even
come close to holding a candle to the gloriousness of Task Coach, so
I've got no alternative to replace it with.

As a result, I dove head-first into a computer science course so I
can write my own version of it and will no longer be reliant on some
unknown or distant developer to keep it available. I'm not
quite finished with that, though, so there's going to be an
as-yet-unspecified gap of time during which the switch to the latest
and greatest isn't going to be great.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.