Toolbox on Mac

[Xavier Barker]

Hi Aidan,

Sharing folders in VirtualBox is easy enough.  You simply choose (in 
Mac) Devices>Shared FOlders> CLick on the + and then input the path of 
any folder you want on the Mac/.Nix side: e.g. 
/users/username/Foldername.  Then give the user full (read/write) 
permissions and you're set.  In fact, VirtualBox then handles it pretty 
much the way you suggest: It creates a mapped drive by UNC Path, such as 
\\vboxsvr\foldername in the windows VM.  If you can't leave WIndows, 
VirtualBox is the way to go - it will do anything you want and if it 
doesn't, you've not lost anything as it's free.

Darwine or Crossover?  The arguments will be the same; Darwine's free 
and open-source, Crossover is commercial, not-free (quite costly) and 
closed-source.   On the flip-side, Darwine is not maintained very well 
so there's fewer updates, Crossover is updated regularly.  The only 
questions at the end of the day are of preference and freedom to use the 
software you own.
Cheers,
Xavier

On 18/05/10 1:58 PM, Aidan Wilson wrote:
> I have been using toolbox on Ubuntu with wine and it works fairly well 
> - some issues at times, but when talking about toolbox, it's difficult 
> to separate issues involving wine from those involving toolbox itself.
>
> On a Mac, Joe Blythe shoehorned toolbox on his mac  using crossover, 
> and Jeremy Hammond used Parallels, each swears by his method. The 
> difference is that parallels is running a virtual machine (that 
> integrates nicely with the Mac OS), so you have to have a copy of 
> Windows (but with an institutional affiliation, you should be able to 
> get it for free); crossover is a windows emulator, but I find setting 
> it up to be prohibitively difficult.
>
> I might also suggest using virtualbox, by sun microsystems. It's just 
> a virtual machine again, but it's free and open source, but doesn't 
> quite integrate with the host as much as Parallels does - I have had 
> some trouble defining shared folders, for instance, so I can't pass 
> files from the host to the virtual machine and vice versa. However I 
> can map a network drive, so you could potentially configure your mac 
> to share itself over the network, and then mount it in the virtual 
> machine as a samba drive... (I'm only considering this as an option 
> now - never tried it, but it could work - I may give it a go in my 
> spare time today and report back).
>