Toolbox on Mac

[Aidan Wilson]

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).

-- 
Aidan Wilson

The University of Sydney
+612 9036 9558
+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at usyd.edu.au


On Tue, 18 May 2010, Mark Post wrote:

> Dear RNLD-ers,
>
> I am currently contemplating switching to a MacBook for my field laptop for 
> various reasons (viruses, reliability, speed, video-editing capabilities, 
> etc.), but quite honestly cannot imagine a world without Toolbox.
>
> I was wondering whether anyone on the list has used recent versions of 
> Toolbox (post-1.5) with CrossOverMac or Wine (Windows emulators) extensively, 
> and if so what your experiences have been like.
>
> If anyone has any similar experiences with Ubuntu 9 or 10, I'd be grateful 
> for any information on that as well, although less urgently.
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Mark
>
>