Toolbox crossovers vs parallels

[Jeremy Hammond]

I have tried both parallels and Wine on OSX.

My sentiments for parallels are similar to Aidan's on Virtualbox. The newer versions seem to work quite well and are nicely integrated with OSX. I even used to write in Word 07 on a virtual windows machine because of my dislike of the pervious office for mac 2008.

I did have a few issues getting some network printers working, but they might be better in the most recent release. You can trial it for free for 14 days if you have a spare XP or Win 7 license hanging around. My biggest  complaint that is if you don't use it often then sometimes it and the virtual machine can take time to do all its updates etc before working again.

Compared to a Wine version of toolbox I found parallels much better. The Wine version I was using had extremely annoying bugs with keystrokes, in particular modifier keys and special characters. Copying and pasting wasn't as efficient as parallels. Finally I really got annoyed with the startup of the Wine-Toolbox program. This may have been specific to our version but it required a ridiculous amount of tedious directory navigation to even open a toolbox 'database'. In fact file navigation in Wine is just bad.

My latest solution is to abandon the useful but flawed toolbox...perhaps write my own dictionary/interlinear function.

Further news they/we are working on getting interlinearisation into Elan though this is early days yet - perhaps 2012 sometime, though no promises. Some folks in Paris have developed a plugin that kinda works, which I have used to limited success, but I wouldn't suggest it for a long term or robust solution.

Regards,
Jeremy



-------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeremy Hammond
Syntax, Typology and Information Structure Group
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
P: +31-24-3521171
E: Jeremy.Hammond at mpi.nl<mailto:Jeremy.Hammond at mpi.nl>
W: http://www.mpi.nl/people/hammond-jeremy

On 07/12/2011, at 2:30 AM, Aidan Wilson wrote:

I also used virtual box on a linux host to run guests such as sun, free BSD,
and Windows (I still use the same Windows 'disk' as I used back then; they're
sharable too, they're just a .vdi (virtual disk image) file in the Virtal Box
directory) and never had much of an issue. Haven't tried running it on a
Windows host however.

I also used Wine on Linux and that worked okay. It got better with age, by
which I mean that later releases were less buggy than the terrible early
releases (but now I see the excellent pun). I haven't tried Wine on anything
else but Linux.

--
Aidan Wilson

PhD Candidate in Linguistics
School of Languages and Linguistics
The University of Melbourne

+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au<mailto:aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au>
@aidanbwilson

On Wed, 7 Dec 2011, John Mansfield wrote:

Another Windows emulator is Wine. I haven't used it myself, but enough people have recommended it to me that I would check it out if I wanted to go down this path.
I've had very thorny problems with VirtualBox - too much boring detail to describe here - but that was when I was using it to run a Linux virtual machine on a Windows XP
platform. I.e., the opposite situation to what you're discussing. So maybe it runs more smoothly the other way round.

j

On 7 December 2011 11:30, Aidan Wilson <aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
     Hi Margaret,

     I run Toolbox using a virtual machine through VirtualBox, a VM cient written by Sun Microsystems some time ago and since bought by Oracle. It's still free, but you
     need to have an operating system to install on it. Windows XP is usually quite easy to find.

     I've never used Crossover, but I've seen others use it an seen how clunky it can be to load software in it. Emulators in general I think can be a bit awkward, but
     then again so can running an entire virtal machine for one program.

     One good thing about virtualbox is that it has seamless integration with the host operating system, so I can now copy-paste between windows and mac, and I can 'hide'
     the windows background and auto-hide the start bar, so it's essentially invisible, but the toolbox windows sit in the same space as everything else. You can also
     mount local (host machine) directories, such as your entire home directory, on the guest machine so they render as networked folders (on a virtual network between
     the host and the guest).

     When I first used virtualbox, I created a disk image that had just about everything stripped out of it (IE, outlook, windows 'live' things, office things, etc.) so
     that it was a really small operating system. Despite this it's still a huge space hog. And you also have to allocate a certain amount of ram to it for when it's
     running, but as I only have a couple of things on it (toolbox and any other program I need that isn't available on Mac) it generally only needs 512MB ram. If your
     computer has 2GB at least then this is a negligible loss.

     The benefits of using a virtual machine increase when you need to add more programs, in my opinion.

     Can't speak to parallels, but I've used VM ware fusion and I think the free and open-source Virtal Box is superior to it in every conceivable way.

     --
     Aidan Wilson

     PhD Candidate in Linguistics
     School of Languages and Linguistics
     The University of Melbourne

     +61428 458 969
     aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au
     @aidanbwilson

     On Fri, 2 Dec 2011, Margaret Carew wrote:

           Hi – just wondering who prefers using toolbox with crossovers – or is parallels better?

           thanks
           --
           Margaret Carew
           Arandic Endangered Languages Project
           Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education
           Alice Springs NT 0870
           08 8951 8344 / 0422 418 559
           margaret.carew at batchelor.edu.au






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