[Bglug] mac2lin part 2: Back to Business

[Andrew Howlett]

so i've got my files on an unencrypted HFS+ external hard drive. but I can't get any work done because I can't access my customer files, answer their email messages, or MOST IMPORTANTLY invoice them.

i need a laptop. as a complete co-incidence, last week my refurbished PC supplier had Dell Latitude E5520 on sale so I bought one for $240. The plan was to resell it but given the specs ( i5 2520M 2.5GHz, 4GB DDR3, 320GB HD, DVD/RW, Webcam, Win7Pro ) it will make a decent linux laptop. The HD is too small but that's ok because I'm going to re-use the 980GB SSD from my (dead) macbook.

first i installed the SSD and installed windows 10. WHAT! yes, i want a dual boot machine, so installed win10pro x64 using the product key that came with the laptop. the  windows partition will cost me 100GB of SSD space, but that's ok because I can delete the Win7 virtual machines that I used on my macbook which ran way too slow in a VManyway.

Once that was done I started the fun stuff. Using the windows partition, downloaded a copy of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and burned to DVD. Then rebooted
and installed Ubuntu. Everything works. Wow. Last time I installed linux on a laptop must have been seven years ago and I had to tweak lots of settings, power management was barely working. But as far as I can tell everything just works with Ubuntu 16.04. It is fast too, at least as fast as my macbook. The Unity desktop is actually pretty similar to Mac OS X. Firefox was preinstalled, but I added Chrome using the Ubuntu Software installer.

then I plugged in my external drive and transfered about  450GB of stuff to my shiny new (refurbished) linux machine.

I'm using Thunderbird for email. Honestly, Thunderbird is not as good as Mac Mail but it is good enough. I keep my contacts on gmail, so I installed the gContactSync extension which works flawlessly. I also use google calendar to sync all my appointments. So I installed the Lightning calendar add on and the Provider for Google Calendar add on. Configuring the Google Calendar provider seemed a little awkward compared to how its done on phones, but it downloaded 1781 events from my google calendar and displayed my daily schedule in less than a minute. So no complaints.

I added Oracle VirtualBox from the Ubuntu Software installer. It took some research to figure out how to transfer the virtual machines to the new host, but once i found the correct procedure it is actually very easy. I had already transfered my "VirtualBox VMs" folders, ie:

/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Debian
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP GOG
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Windows XP Home SP3 clean
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP SP3 Debug
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Spector Viewer
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Win7 Pro OEM Office 2007 Clone
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Black
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Windows XP OHIPWin
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Win7 Pro OEM Office 2007
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Win7Pro x86
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Zone 4
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Debian 7.2.0 i386
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/Windows 7
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Quickbooks

Each virtual machine folder contains several items, including a *.vbox file:

/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Quickbooks/WinXP Quickbooks-disk1.vdi
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Quickbooks/Logs
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Quickbooks/Snapshots
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Quickbooks/WinXP Quickbooks.vbox-prev
/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Quickbooks/WinXP Quickbooks.vbox

So here's the procedure: launch the "Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager". Go to the Main Menu and from the Machine menu select the Add menuitem. A
file selection window will appear. Select the vbox file, eg "/home/andrew/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP Quickbooks/WinXP Quickbooks.vbox". Click Open. The virtualmachine has now been added to the VM Manager. All the snapshots should be listed.

So now I have access to my client documents using LibreOffice (installed with Ubuntu). I've got email, calendar and contacts using thunderbird. And I've got billing using Quickbooks in a Windows XP virtual machine.

Back in business on Linux!