I have, at this time, 2 laptops, two Ubuntu partitions on one, and three on the other, plus two usb 1TB drives. Ubuntu is great, but things happen, so I often find I have to copy some folders and files back and forth for redundancy and backups.
I had a 14.04 install completely fail last week due to what seems to be a bug in one of the interfaces available via Gnome Session Manager. I ran down the people handling that project and gave them details of the failure. I lost everything as it died, because I was afraid to port the user account to another partition. There was a bug evidently in a setting because whatever the bug was, it went along messing things up with the account and other settings, causing commands not to work properly right and left.
So I stared over from scratch. A few hours work, and I had almost everything back up and running except Virtualbox. I copied over three VDI files for different versions of Windows from a different partition and began the process of doing New in Virtualbox. Everything seemed to go well but Win2k would not allow me to add and use PureBasic due to missing modules, WinXP's keyboard froze and the cursor disappeared when positioned over the client. And it and could not be recovered, forcing a manual reboot, Then Win7 got a fatal error that would not be fixed. But these same VDIs worked on the original partition. Very confusing.
What I wanted to do was just copy everything involving Virtualbox and the three VDIs over and be done with it. But I've tried that before, and I am always missing something it seems, So what do I need to do to make a clean and complete copy of the Virtualbox configuration and settings from one partition to another?
I see a setting for making a clone, but don't know if that is with the same UUID or not. A clone in that sense might be good for a backup. With a different UUID, it could be a second client or possibly used to replace the original later if it goes bad for any reason. Trouble is, copying over the Virtual VMs seems to raise a fuss as it is now on a different partition, and the only option offered is to copy the errors to the clipnoard, not to adjust the settings to a new partition. This speaks badly for the prospects of backing up the folders and files, reformatting the partition and getting a new UUID, then restoring the backup. There is a similar problem with boot options and /etc/sftab. The move to UUID has been has bit of a pain in the ... neck. Maybe I am looking at the wrong backup method.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'd like to just be able to install the larest version of Virtualbox, grab the extensionpack, doubleclick on it to get Virtualbox to add it, then have it work with the existing Virtual VMs and VDIs, or copy the Virtual VMs and VDIs to that partition and have Virtualbox accept them as is. If that is not on the table, feed me some better ideas please.
Mmm. Always seems odd that you download the extensionpack on a different page than the downloads, and that you have to click in the extensionpack to get virtualbox to open up and add it, mot click on vitualbox that checks for or get exgtensionpack and add it. Nothing evident on the web pagrs as to why you might need extensionpack either. On top of which the Ubuntu repositories give favortism to the OSE version already present, and you have to type the full name of virtualbox-5,0 for the Ubuntu Software Center to list it even after the deb addition to /etc/apt/sources.list and runniing sudo apt-get -qq update. Nobody mentions having to use sudo either, but it is needed. The -qq just cuts some of the chatter. The install should be sudo apt-get -qq -y install virtualbox-5,0. To make it into a two-line set of commands and one simple copy and paste of both at once in a terminal window for Ubuntu 5.10 as an example:
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian wily contrib
" >> /etc/apt/sources.list; sudo apt-get -qq update; sudo apt-get -qq -y install virtualbox-5.0
Could probably add a wget one-liner for fetching the extensionpack as well.
It would not be that much of a stretch to have a single sh or bash script that could recognize the linux version and grab the right process and changes to be made. It's not that I'm too lazy or anything. It's just that newbees may be lost as to what they should do here, how to do it, or what steps to take next. If uncomfortable with appending the deb line to /etc/apt/sources.list on the blind, you can always run an awk command against the file when done to ensure no duplicate entries are in it. Several examples have been posted of using awk this way at various sites on-line.
I think virtualbox is the greatest thing going. Now that I'm getting ready to dabble in Python on Android ported to x86 so that I can assist my son remotely with a new tablet, I expect to be using it more. I'm off windows entirely myself because it in no way measures up to Linux when it comes to really getting things done. Bash isn't bug-free in terms of passing arguments, but there us usually a way to make things happen if you get online and ask enough questions or look at what others are doing. But even the experts resort to perl or C/C++ for some tasks. Python, Java, and C/C++ are mentioned most in talking about Android it seems. I did encounter mention of Go the other day, but haven't looked into it yet.