Creating a VirtualBox VM from a VMware machine

I recently had some problems where my VMplayer was running really slow for an XP guest machine on my Vista host machine. The performance was terrible -- very very unusably slow. It took 10 minutes to boot and then would have a 2-3 second lag (at least) when moving mouse and clicking on something. I have no idea why, so I thought I'd try some other options.

I decided to try Virtual Box, the free VM player from Oracle/Sun. So far, it work pretty well.

I was able to use the existing VMware disk image for my Vbox image. I copied the VMware .vmdx files from my existing directory into a new place, then created a new Vbox image and pointed it to the existing disk image. It was VERY straight forward.

The one problem I had was networking and display drivers. When I boot the machine, it didn't want to work at very well, all. It  had the generic VGA driver and NO network driver. This made it hard for it to get network disk drivers.

As it turns out, the virtual ethernet control looked close enough to the VMware AMD PCnet device that it was trying to use that driver, which of course failed. Virtual Box comes with some "guest tools" that can be installed which fix the problem. I had to install the guest tools inside the XP image (mounted as CD from ISO image). I also ran the 'unpack drivers' step from the command line based on their instructions to unpack the drivers into a local directory, although I'm not sure that was needed.  After installing these tools, the network adapters STILL didn't work. They were still trying to use the VMware drivers.

I fixed the problem by using "update driver" from the Device manager, then picking my own specific location and driver. It already recognized that it had the VBox AMD PCnet driver installed, but some how was priortizing the VMware one. I simply selected the VBox adapter and it started working.

Another note: I chose 'bridged adapter' in the configuration simply because the Cisco VPN client I was using in my image works better with that. I suspect it would work fine with NAT as well.

The 'guest tools' also installed and fixed the display driver so it ran a little better.

Overall: Vbox seems to be running very smoothly. I like it so far.


Side note: VirtualBox runs on Intel Macs, as well.


Rich

Using Alfresco 3.2 "Share" capabilities

I recently install Alfresco 3.2 Community on a VMware image on my machine to play with it. For information on how I did that, see my other post.

I had some questions about how, exactly, I might use the 'share' capabilities. These basically emulate a lot of the capabilities that Microsoft Sharepoint provides. I believe, in fact, that Alfresco actually presents a Sharepoint protocol interface that can be used by other sharepoint clients.

Questions:


Questions:

• Q: How do I get to WebDAV path of files in Document library?
• A: http://192.168.177.131:8080/alfresco/webdav/Sites/firstsite which is the same technique used for all other Alfresco WebDAV access.
  

• Is there a way to directly edit document library files
• Is there a way to share files between “Share” and “Alfresco” hierarchy?
• o A: “Alfresco” main site sees the content of the “sites” hierarchy as files data, but I don't think the "Share" sites have a good view of the containing Alfresco instance
  
• o Operations on the items seems to be limited. I don't seem to be able to create "rules" on documents within a "site" document library, but I'm not sure I ever was.
  
• o Can Embed a “widget” or treat as a “site” ?
• o Tried with a “web view” applet, but that requires you to login and doesn’t really connect to much.

• - How would we create a main company site, then show highlights of other sites for projects
• - How do we create template share sites to create new projects?
• - Is there a quick way to “monitor” for changes in a site? (e.g. email)

• Q: Is there a way to create an “intro page” for a site?
• o A: yes. “Customize Dashboard” to move around widgets.

Setting up Alfresco 3.2 Community in a Linux VM

I've used Alfresco a bunch in the past at work to maintain documents. We're thinking of upgrading from the (very) old 2.2 release to the (much) newer 3.2 release. This is what I did to get started.

I set this up in a VMware image of a Ubuntu Workstation 9.04 (512 MB RAM, 25GB disk). For information on this, see my other blog post.

To get started with Alfresco, I did the following:
- Download Sun jdk 1.6 se, install, move to /usr/local/java
- Sudo apt-get install mysql-server
** Ask for a new root PW. Set one.
- Download alfresco 3.2 community from http://www.alfresco.org
- Sudo ./Alfresco-....-install
o Chose /opt/alfresco as installation location
o Asks for root pw of mysql;
o Creates ‘alfresco’ database in mysql
o Ask for where Open Office is installed. I fed it /usr/lib/openoffice after locating it on my disk.
o Start Alfresco
- . cd /opt/alfresco
- . ./alf_start.sh
- (wait)
- http://localhost:8080/alfresco

This produces and “up and running” version of alfresco. (NOTE: The NAT interface between my host OS and guest Linux OS is 192.168.177.x. Host is .1 and guest is .177, hence the interfaces below.)
- http://192.168.177.131:8080/alfresco allows access from my external machine
- Shows "guest" account view by default
- Login: admin (default PW)
- Created user for rmills
- Tested login and upload of a document.

Alternate Interface: Alfresco Share

• http://192.168.177.131:8080/share
• Login: rmills or admin
• Create a site (Collaboration Site)
• Name: FirstSite
• URL: firstsite
• Public

Setting up an easy VMware Linux machine

I spent a few minutes playing around with VMware to get a linux virtual machine set up on my PC. It was actually fairly easy:

• Download and install latest VMware Player from www.vmware.com (reboot)
  
• Download a Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop virtual machine from the "Appliance > Operating Systems" section of the VM Ware site
• Unpack the VM image
• Double click on the virtual machine and VMware player starts up.

Magic. Easy.

Now I have a VM running linux on my machine that I can play with. It seems to be auto configured with NAT networking, so I can use SMB to access shared drives on my host PC to transfer files back and forth. It can also reach the internet with a web browser, etc.