[ubuntu-za] Windows apps on Ubuntu

[Tom Bamford]

Hi Jan

On 1 June 2012 17:01, Jan Greeff <jan at verslank.net> wrote:
> I tried Crossover, it was a disaster. There has been much talk of Wine, but
> I have been totally unable to make anything of this, what appears to be a
> Crossover hybrid.

Crossover is essentially the commercial variant of Wine (it is
actually Wine with some extra closed source components added). I am
not a fan of either but others do have great success with various
Windows apps.

>
> The only thing that has worked for me is Virtualbox, which is also not
> hassle-free. I have been told you can save the files and reinstall them
> after upgrading via clean install, but the files appear to get corrupted.
>
> Gramps is not an option, so unless someone out there has found some magic
> solution, it's back to Virtualbox for me, having to start anew with every
> clean install.

Migrating virtual machines in VirtualBox from one Ubuntu installation
to another has gotten a whole lot easier in the last few releases (I
think from VirtualBox 4.0 onwards?).

The easiest method I've found is to make sure you copy the "Virtual
Machines" folder and the ".VirtualBox" folder from your old home
directory to your new one. Then start up VirtualBox. If you run
VirtualBox before copying the files you can just delete the ones that
is auto-creates and then copy them afresh.

When I do this, VirtualBox picks up all my VMs in the same state as I
left them before reinstalling.

Regards
Tom

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System Administrator
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
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