Virtualbox
Good morning, for those of you that have found an extra special .ova that you want to use. Here is the rundown of VM, OVA, OVF and how to use them.
What is a virtual machine?
A VM emulates a computer system which allows you, for example, to run a copy of WindowsXP as a guest OS(operating system) on any supported host(Linux/Mac/Windows). The host computer is your physical computer, the guest computer is the virtual system running inside of Virtualbox.
What is an .ova?
OVA is a tar archive file with the OVF directory inside. OVF is a standard way of packaging and distributing a Virtual Appliance(pre-configured virtual machine)
Just tell me how to get it on my windows computer.
No problem, just follow these instructions.
Download and install Virtualbox, the second link that says Windows Hosts: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads at the time of writing/last update it's: https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.16/VirtualBox-6.1.16-140961-Win.exe
Download the EXAMPLE.ova from where ever you get your awesome EXAMPLE.ova from, remember the directory where you downloaded it to.
Open Virtualbox, click on File>Import Appliance(ctrl+i), click on the folder icon, select the sweet EXAMPLE.ova file that you downloaded in the previous step. Click next, import, done.
(optional but recommended)Once you have your VM started, you can install guest extensions, set up a shared folder to the host and install a PDF printer. I use CuteWriter(based on the free/opensource GPL Ghostscript) current link:
http://www.cutepdf.com/download/CuteWriter.zipFirst enable the print spooler: Start>Run>services.msc>Print Spooler>Automatic>Start. Then install both parts from the .zip archive.It appears that the newest version doesn't support Windows XP, so you will have to download an older version from here: https://download.cutepdf.com/public/cutewriter32.exe and the converter, install the converter first https://cutepdf.com/download/converter.exe
Enjoy!
Just tell me how to get it on my Linux computer.
Simply install the Virtualbox package using your favorite package manager.
Open a terminal(ctrl+alt+t on my Ubuntu system)
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
See #2 above
What about my MacOS computer?
Install Virtualbox from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads as of right now as I write/update this, the latest is https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.16/VirtualBox-6.1.16-140961-OSX.dmg
Then import the OVA image into Virtualbox as above.
For guest additions and extensions packs:
The guest additions are required for shared folders and a bunch of other stuff that makes it more convenient to use. The extension pack is more specialized and not really required for a lot of use cases.
Go here: https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox
Select the exact version of virtualbox that you have installed, download your extensions pack extpack, and the guest editions iso.
Example file names for version 6.0.14:
Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-6.0.14.vbox-extpack
VBoxGuestAdditions_6.0.14.iso