GCA In Linux

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by mukibear

Does anyone care to have a writeup of how to install VirtualBox and use it to run windows whatever and GCA under Linux/Ubuntu? It's MUCH better than Wine and you only need a product key for your Windows box.

Has anyone had any trouble with it? I just installed VBox, installed Windows (XP I think, whatever it was I had lying around), set up a shared folder and a PDF printer… OK, that's not quite as trivial as I'd remembered it.

Things I'd recommend you include, therefore:

- selecting the Windows OS (XP does virtualisation well, and won't insist on a network connection to phone home)
- don't give it even a virtual network adaptor, because it doesn't need one
- do set up shared folders, so that (a) you can keep your GCA4 files under version control (maybe that's just me) and (b) you can dump PDFs out to disc and print them from the Linux side
- install a PDF printer; I have a version of Acrobat Distiller I bought years ago, but others are available too.

[mukibear]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Has anyone had any trouble with it? I just installed VBox, installed Windows (XP I think, whatever it was I had lying around), set up a shared folder and a PDF printer… OK, that's not quite as trivial as I'd remembered it.

Things I'd recommend you include, therefore:

- selecting the Windows OS (XP does virtualisation well, and won't insist on a network connection to phone home)
- don't give it even a virtual network adaptor, because it doesn't need one
- do set up shared folders, so that (a) you can keep your GCA4 files under version control (maybe that's just me) and (b) you can dump PDFs out to disc and print them from the Linux side
- install a PDF printer; I have a version of Acrobat Distiller I bought years ago, but others are available too.

Well, exactly - it's not about GCA4 at all, but VirtualBox - maybe just some links to HowTo sites. The shared folders was a bit weird, but still, this is much more complex than sudo apt-get install mybutt. Frankly, the real problem was getting a windows license from my old computers - do you know Linux can read the embedded product key for such as netbooks? Right now I'm stuck with win7 that will expire in 30 days - can you have a legal copy on one partition and use the same key for your VM? I have win2000....

[mukibear]

I just installed win2k with GCA4, it works like a charm. hint, get netscape 9 for a browser.