Madcap products in a Virtualbox environment

[David29]

Greetings,

I hope this question is not too specific for this forum. This Apple shop wants to try a Flare demo within Oracle's free Virtualbox because developers here already use Virtualbox.

To those of you who use Virtualbox on a Mac: What is the right hard drive file type--VDI, VMDK, VHD . . . ? The developers use VMDK and run a virtual appliance with FreeBSD for the OS.

I have used VM Fusion for the environment for FrameMaker, but the inertia here favors Virtualbox.

Thank you from a long-time Frame user who is weary of it now,

David

[2bemused]

VDI is the default or native Virtualbox hard drive file format. VMDK is compatible with Vmware. VHD is compatible with Microsoft Virtual PC. Is there a specific reason why the developers are using VMDK? If not then VDI should be the choice. You will have to install Windows on the Virtual machine, in order to run Flare.

Philip

[SteveS]

...and welcome to the forums (both of you).

I've run Flare on virtual machines from Microsoft and Oracle with no problems, provided you install Windows as the virtual machine's operating system.

[David29]

Thank you both for the answers. (The use of VMDK has something to do with the virtual Dell box they use for development.)

An engineering director managed to finesse the whole thing into working, but not I cannot get Flare to import a Word doc by using the Word-file-without-Word option. I hope the use of VMDK (a possibly unwise choice) rather than VDI by the engineering director is not the problem.

David

[RamonS]

I don't think the Word import problem has to do with the format of the virtual disk. That is either a permissions issue or something else. Do you get any errors when you try the Word import?

[David29]

I looked around this forum and saw that someone had problems with trying Import-a-Word doc-without-the-Word presence under Windows 7, 64-bit. That is the same environment here: I can pull the Word file over, but Flare seems to balk.

The solution might be to install Word even as a demo in the virtual environment and use the Flare import option that *does* have Word available.

David