Abe Books Homebase on Linux Mint? [solved]

[Tonym49]

Hello everyone. I am putting out a general enquiry for help. The situation is this. I have 2 friends who run a Book Shop and who sell online with Abe Books. Neither of them is a 'Computer Person', they use an old Samsung laptop that runs Windows 7. In order to sell via the Abe website they need a piece of software from Abe Books called Homebase 2.3. This is ONLY available for Windows. It looks to me to be a custom spreadsheet. With the approaching end to Microsoft support for Windows 7 they need to consider their options. Given all the negative news regarding Windows 10, they are understandably reluctant to go that route. In the past I have lent my laptop to let them try Linux Mint, and they found it does everything they need, apart from running Homebase, which is a must have. Over the past couple of weeks I have been looking to see if I can get Homebase to run on my home desktop using either Wine or by running Windows 7 in Virtual Box. At this point maybe I should say more about myself and my experience. I am approaching 70, and although I tried various Linux distros before settling on Mint, I do not have the in depth of knowledge that you younger guys and girls will have. My knowledge of Windows is near zero.

This said, I have had mixed, and slightly frustrating results, with both approaches. With Wine, downloaded Homebase from the Abe Books website and installed using Play on Linux. The program installs and will open, but does not run. It looks to me as though it may be missing some, presumably windows, dependencies. I have no idea what to look for, or where to look. With Virtual Box, I think I am near success. I downloaded a VM copy of Windows 7 and installed in Virtual Box. Got that running and then installed Homebase, and it seems to work. On opening it asked me to log in or create a new account. So far so good. The problem is transferring files between the guest and host OS's. I have created a directory for file sharing and selected 'Bidirectional' and so forth when doing the settings in VB, and installed the Guest Additions. I was able to copy from Linux to Windows, and the directory appears as a shared file in Windows, but I am unable to copy files from Windows to Linux, which is a must for this to be of use. I suspect I have missed something somewhere, maybe again permissions in Windows? but again I have no idea what to look for or where to look. If anyone has any ideas, we would be most grateful for your help. Thanks in advance. Tony

[deepakdeshp]

For file sharing on the LAN Samba has to be configured. ANother approach is to copy files on a USB pen drive and move them where ever you need.

[RIH]

The problem is transferring files between the guest and host OS's. I have created a directory for file sharing and selected 'Bidirectional' and so forth when doing the settings in VB, and installed the Guest Additions. I was able to copy from Linux to Windows, and the directory appears as a shared file in Windows, but I am unable to copy files from Windows to Linux, which is a must for this to be of use.

I am surprised that you are having problems with copying files from Windows into a shared directory & then reading them in Mint.
I have managed to do this (both ways) for a number of years - although I will admit I have not tried this with Mint 19.x & VM 5.x.

What type of files are you trying to move from Windows to Mint?
Is Windows giving any sort of error message when you try??

I notice that you say you have shared the Directory Bidirectional ... which sort of makes me think you are actually talking about trying to share the Clipboard rather than a Directory... but that could be me over-thinking it...


p.s. I am only a couple of years your junior, so maybe a bright young thing can help more..

[RIH]

Tony I have just tried a new install of Windows 7 on VirtualBox 5.2.18_Ubuntu r123745 on Mint Cinnamon 19.1

Once the Guest Additions was loaded it was no issue to move files both ways through a shared folder.

If you are still having problem I will be happy to do a step by step for you...

[Tonym49]

RIH. Hello, thank you very much for your reply, simply knowing that what I am trying to do is possible is a great help and encouragement.

"I notice that you say you have shared the Directory Bidirectional ... which sort of makes me think you are actually talking about trying to share the Clipboard rather than a Directory... but that could be me over-thinking it..."

What I am trying to share is a Directory. I created a 'Share' directory in Terminal [ mkdir Share ] and set this as the shared directory when creating the Virtual Machine. The need is to be able to transfer text and jpg picture files to and from host and guest. I can copy files into the share directory in Linux, and they appear in the share directory in Windows 7 where I can open, view and edit them much as I would in Linux. The problem is in the other direction. I created some short test text files which I saved to the directory on Windows, but they do not appear in the Linux directory, and I can't see any way of moving them. My experience with Virtual Box is very limited, and with Windows 7 even less. I suspect this is where my problem lays. [The only experience I have of Microsoft goes back to the days of MS DOS and Windows 3. Since then I have avoided them as much as possible with only very limited use at work which only served to reinforce my prejudice ] I obviously need to do some more research on Windows 7 and the process of creating Virtual Machines, but simply knowing it is possible to do what we want is a great help. I will post the results as I progress [or not ] I suspect that with the approaching end of support for Windows 7 there will be others with similar need, and possibly some of them will find their way here and this post will be of help to them in their search for an answer.

Thanks and best wishes to all out there in Linux Mint land Tony

[RIH]

In VirtualBox click on the Settings Cog Wheel in the Menu.
In the windows that appears click on the Shared Folders Tab

Virt 1.png

Click on the Add Folder Icon - it is the top one one the right of the tab.

Click on Other & find the path to the Shared Folder you created.

virt 2.png

Leave Read Only unchecked, but do check the Auto Mount box.

When you enter into Windows 7 you will see the shared folder in File System as a separate item line.

You should be able to copy & paste into & out of it in Windows by using File Manager as normal.

If you go to the Shared Folder in Mint then the files you have posted in Windows should also be visible & usable..

[RIH]

This is what it should look like after Guest Additions have been run - then just treat it as any other drive..

virt 3.png

[Tonym49]

RIH. Thanks again for your trouble, it is much appreciated. I have now got things working properly. What I did was not very different from what I did first time round, except that I created a share Folder in the file manager, not a directory, and I also found I was missing the user group "vboxsf' . Once I had this set up, it was quite straight forward. [To create the usergroup I ran sudo usermod -G vboxsf -a username ] From what I have been able to garner, I think vboxsf should be created automatically as part of the set up of the virtual machine, but in my case it seems not to have been. [Using Mint 19.1 Cinnamon on a self built machine running an AMD Athlon X4 845 CPU in an Asus A88X- Plus motherboard] At this point all seems good, my next step will be to try and replicate this on my laptop so my friends can try it out to see if it will answer their need.
Big thank you to all. tony

[RIH]

Glad you got it sussed Tony...
Don't think you will have much trouble on your friends' machine - hope they like the result!!