virtualbox.org

For the purpose of accessing old documents created by ancient apps only able to run within Rosetta, I am setting a Snow Leopard VM machine that I intend to run on a Lion host (presently under test on another Snow Leo machine).
My configuration does work perfectly in the sense I can launch old applications in the guest machine, but presently I need to move host files to a given, shared location so as to see them on the guest, and then open them in the guest for accessing data.
Last but not least, clipboards are not transferred between guest and host.

All of this seems to relate with some "integration drivers" presently missing for OSX guests (?)

My question: is there a better way that what I do?

Ideally, Id' like something that would allow, when double-clicking on an old file in the host system, to :
- automatically trigger Virtualbox with this designated Snow Leo VM,
- then transfer said file to the VM,
- open it there
- and allow me to copy things from it and transfer the clipboard to the Lion machine.

Thank you!
Herve5

You are thinking of the VM as an application running on your host. In fact you should be thinking about it as a separate PC, which is what it is. Now suppose you had two physical PCs, and you wanted to set things up so that double clicking a file on one PC opened up an application on the other PC. If you know how to do that with two physical PCs then you also know how to do it with a PC and a VM.

If any solution exists it would be in the form of a script which copies a file to a shared location (otherwise the file is not accessible to the other PC), followed by a network message of some kind that gets picked up by a server interface, causing it to run an application. It would require some disturbingly hackable interfaces to be left open. No doubt do-able, with the right experties and tools, and interest. None of which I have!

mpack wrote:You are thinking of the VM as an application running on your host (...)

Thank you for the clarification.

mpack wrote:If any solution exists it would be in the form of a script which copies a file to a shared location (otherwise the file is not accessible to the other PC), followed by a network message of some kind (...)

Well I was raising this because that seems to be the way some parallelization handlers work (for instance I have seen Parallels implementations of Win guests on OSX hosts where double-clicking a Win document on the host just triggers the guest and runs the Win associated app with the original file)

But your remark about scripting indeed is very interesting: if I don't find a readymade solution, there is a lot of simple scripting potential on macintoshes, and I definitely can imagine an host automata that's triggered by a file association, copies the triggering file to a shared folder and launches the Virtualbox machine, while within the guest machine another script is running, just waiting for the file to appear on its side of the shared folder, to run the associated application once the file appears...

I'd still need some process for transfering back the file whenever it is updated, but for my current purpose I mainly need to access old data...

Thank you for this!

You are way ahead of me. Please see my topic, "Guest Host". I was unable to install Snow Leopard in the VM on my Macbook Pro running Lion. How did you do it?

Herve5 wrote:Well I was raising this because that seems to be the way some parallelization handlers work (for instance I have seen Parallels implementations of Win guests on OSX hosts where double-clicking a Win document on the host just triggers the guest and runs the Win associated app with the original file)

That's do-able now with Windows guests, in an awkward kind of way. Basically the document on the host would have to be associated with an application which runs a VM and then sends a "guestcontrol" message into the VM. The document would still have to be in a shared folder - and the trick relies on "guestcontrol", which is a Guest Additions feature, and AIUI, there are no official GAs for Mac, though there has been some unofficial work on compiling Linux GAs for Mac (search suggested if you are interested).

WW wrote:You are way ahead of me. Please see my topic, "Guest Host". I was unable to install Snow Leopard in the VM on my Macbook Pro running Lion. How did you do it?

I reply in your thread

mpack wrote:That's do-able now with Windows guests, in an awkward kind of way. (...)

True, and it'll be as awkward on OSXes, but what is cool with Win VMs is, the 'guestcontrol' thingie is already available ...
Thank you for the hint on Linux recompilations!

---addition on june 14, 2012:
indeed there is another recent thread here about guest-OSX-additions compilation ongoing, there...