Monday, June 25, 2012

Virtual Box VM to VMWare

I prefer either Parallels or VMWare over Virtual Box. Virtual Box is free though. But at 50 bucks, video acceleration is nice to have when working with graphics. So here are steps that work as of today to convert a Virtual Box VM to a VMWare VM. These steps are out there on the interwebs and they aren't difficult but I didn't find them in one place so hopefully this will help someone.


1. From Virtual Box select your VM and choose File | Export Appliance...
2. Download and install VMWare OVF Tool from http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/
3. Run the OVF Tool on you .ova file (I'm on a Mac):

"/Applications/VMware OVF Tool/ovftool" --lax image.ova /Users/[username]/Downloads
NOTE: Use the --lax option to get past some errors that will stop the conversion in their tracks. 4. Drag and drop into VMWare and before you do anything increase the available RAM and processor to at least 2 if you can. Otherwise the Vm will be super sluggish. 5. Run in VMWare!

Monday, June 18, 2012

JavaFX Native Packaging

One of the benefits of native programming languages has been fairly easy deployment and bundling. In many cases static libraries one single EXE. Programming languages that depend on a run-time such as C#, Java, Python, Perl, etc, all require that run-time to be pre installed and the total size (Application + run-time) is typically larger than a native application. Well, I think much of that is over with JDK 7u6 currently in beta. Rich client JavaFX applications can bundle the JRE and your application and provide a very easy installation. So easy in fact it's silly. I love making complicated things super easy! Check out this blog post by one of my colleagues for all the nitty gritty details: https://blogs.oracle.com/talkingjavadeployment/entry/native_packaging_for_javafx