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Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9755

Posted: 01:24am 06 Aug 2019

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Hi. Playing with my Linux Mint box again, but cannot work out how I go about copying files from the VM to Linux, or vise-versa.

I have already installed XP SP3 as a VM, and that is booting and running fine in VirtualBox, including mouse and KB capture, but I can't move files.

I have enabled bidirectional copy-and-paste and clipboard in the settings, but a file that I copy from Linux, cannot be pasted into the XP VM.

Can anyone give me some pointers?

I have been researching this on the web, but the results just say to enable bidirectional clipboard and drag-and-drop to move files from one to the other, but it simply does not work for me.

Procedure:

1) With the XP VM shut-down, I used VM's settings, GENERAL/ADVANCED to set both the clipboard and drag-and-drop to bidirectonal.

2) Boot XP VM.

3) Right-click file I want in Linux, select COPY, left-click.

4) Move to XP VM, right-click

5) PASTE is NOT available.

6) Attempt to drag-and-drop file from Linux folder, to XP desktop - this is refused.

Stuck......

EDIT: Nice to have post editing back. Nice work, Gizmo!

Edited 2019-08-06 11:27 by Grogster

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9755

Posted: 01:50am 06 Aug 2019

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SOLVED!

I had not installed the "VirtualBox Guest Addons" CD thing in the XP machine. Once I downloaded and inserted that CD image in XP, I can now drag-and-drop from Linux to the XP desktop.

By this time, I had also setup a shared folder in Linux with the files I wanted in it, and that also sprang to life once I installed the guest addons.

Not really done much with VirtualBox, so I am learning this at the same time as Mint.

I think the shared folder is probably the best way to do it going forward, but how do I now stop XP from being able to hop onto the Linux network adaptor and having Internet access? I don't want XP to be able to see the web.

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9755

Posted: 02:01am 06 Aug 2019

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Fixed that too. I'm on a roll!

With the XP VM shut-down, SETTINGS/NETWORK - Connected to "Internal Network".

This allows me to share files on the LAN, but totally denies access to the WAN and the Internet. I think that is all I should have to do, yes?

I'm impressed with Linux Mint. The Linux system AND the XP VM run very quickly on this NUC build, and I only have 4GB of RAM on the NUC. My main W10 machine has 16GB and runs slower, and that NUC is technically faster then the NUC I have put Linux on.....

Using Mint's System Monitor, I can see that the RAM usage by Mint is very modest - usually LESS then 2GB for anything I am doing, including when I am running the XP VM.

Quite amazing, when you consider how much RAM Windoze gobbles on a regular basis.

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

tgerbic
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Joined: 25/07/2019
Location: United States
Posts: 94

Posted: 04:58am 06 Aug 2019

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Grogster,

You are on a roll...

Some things to remember about running VBox:
1. You should do a full clone of the XP VM and put on another drive, machine, or on a Blueray disk (25G or 50G) as a backup. If something happens to your current system, you can rebuild HW or SW to get linux back and copy the clone over and you are good to go from where XP was when the clone was made. Alternately you could run Vbox on W10 and run the XP VM there till linux is up.

2. You occasionally need to update the guest additions rev when the VBox rev is updated. Generally not too big an issue except when it comes to USB 2.0 support.

3. I run XP and W10 in VMs on my system. If you decide to put W10 in a VM, you will notice it takes a lot more resource than XP even when idling. I run XP with two cores and 2376MB of memory. W10 is given 2 cores and 4096MB of memory. If I think I need more performance for W10, I change the cores/memory settings before launching it. I have 8 cores so I might give W10 up to 5 or 6 if I have something performance intensive to do. Just remember to reset the cores back to a more normal setting for other uses.

Regards

Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9755

Posted: 06:45am 07 Aug 2019

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Thanks for your post.

Yes, once I have the XP running all the Windoze CAD I want to use, I will backup the VM somewhere.

The next thing I need to work out is how I connect to other SAMBA shares on the LAN, and how I can install a network printer. I might be able to get some software for the printer install from the printer website, so I will check there first.

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

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