Solar Fire setup guide on Mac
Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2019 6:27 pm
Hi all,
My computer recently kicked the bucket. (Yes, I tried valiantly to save it; the hardware is toast.)
I took this as an opportunity to go back to using a Mac, which is what I did for years and years. I am very happy with my decision (sorry, Windows people
). What I did was I set up a virtual machine and ran Windows 10 in it, and installed Solar Fire perfectly easily there. For those who are less familiar with this concept, a virtual machine is essentially a quarantined section of your computer's memory which is set up to pretend that it's just a separate computer entirely (although your computer, with its host operating system, will quietly manage it and pull the strings from the shadows).
I have used Windows virtual machines on MacOS before, but since I recently set it up, I thought I'd put together a little checklist in case anyone else found themselves wanting/needing to pull this off.
It's not difficult, but it has been annoying because VirtualBox's documentation really sucks... but the software is free, so I guess I can't complain.
It's possible I'm going to miss a step or two here, and it's going to likely be a little different depending on the OS you're running and such, but the steps below would've saved me about an hour of googling if I had had access to them - so in that spirit, here you go.
Part 0: Here's what you need
1. The Solar Fire installer. This will usually be a file with named SF9025usa.exe or something along those lines.
2. A Mac. I am running 10.14 Mojave, but this should be basically the same for any of the most recent versions of OS X (macOS). If you're running the dev version of Catalina I have no idea what you should expect.
3. A Windows license if you want to customize Windows at all. You don't actually need this, but Windows will be unhappy that it's unregistered.
Part 1: Download the Windows 10 ISO. This is basically the installer for Windows 10 itself.
Here you go - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/softwar ... ndows10ISO
Note that this is free to download, because Microsoft assumes you're going to enter a license key later on.
It's probably going to yell at you for trying to download a Windows installer on a computer that it recognizes already has macOS running on it, but ignore that.
Part 2: Download Virtualbox. We're going to build Windows inside of it. Windows will think it's running on its own computer.
1. Get Virtualbox from this link; click on OS X hosts to start the download. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. Run the dmg that you just downloaded, and follow all the prompts. The defaults for each of the options are probably fine for you.
3. Click on the "new" button, and create a box that will be for your new operating system. Select Windows 10 and the bit version (almost certainly 64 bit).
4. Determine how much RAM you're going to dedicate to the virtual machine. (1024 megabytes is a gigabyte.) As far as I know, you can't change this later unless you delete the VM and start over.
RAM allocation is going to determine how fast (more or less) each of your operating systems are going to run - allocating more to Windows will make it run faster, but it will slow down your Mac operating system while it's running. (You get all the RAM back when the virtual machine is paused or turned off.) You can check your RAM by clicking on the Apple logo on the top left, and clicking "About This Mac." The value you're looking for is "Memory" on the info screen.
Most of you will probably have 8gb of RAM. If you've got more, great!
I set aside 4gb out of my 16gb for Windows. Windows 10 is a little slow on only 4 gigs, but it runs fine - I'm literally running nothing but Solar Fire on it. I would recommend this for most of you. If you're doing REALLY intense reporting in Solar Fire and have over 8gb to play with, maybe consider going higher.
5. Virtualbox will prompt you to create a virtual hard disk for the Windows system to live in. Select "Create a virtual hard disk now"
6. At the next prompt, select VDI (Virtual Disk Image) as the type of storage. The other options are just virtual drive formats that are compatible with other virtualization software.
7. Select whether you want to allocate a dynamic amount of memory (so it doesn't eat up your disk space until you use it), or fixed (which it claims is faster). I had space to play with, so I chose fixed.
8. Determine how much actual storage memory you're using. I set aside 40gb for the virtual machine to live in. That was probably overkill, but if you've got that much memory to spare, go ahead. The absolute minimum you can get away with is somewhere around 25gb.
Congratulations, you've created a virtual machine!
Part 3: Install Windows.
1. On the left panel of the Virtualbox screen, select the new VM you created.
2. In the center of the screen, click Display.
3. Set the video controller to VBoxVGA, and click OK.
4. In the center pane, scroll down until you see Storage. Click on SATA port 1, which should say [Optical Drive] Empty. Select Choose disk image. Select the Windows ISO you downloaded in Part 1.
5. Press the green Start arrow at the top of the screen.
6. Let the machine boot, and follow the prompts to install Windows. When it prompts you for a Windows license, unless you've got one handy, just select "I don't have a license" or a similarly named option.
The screen is most likely going to be horrifically tiny. We'll need to just grin and bear it through the Windows installation process, although if you look along the bottom of the VM once it launches, there will be a bunch of little icons. There's one that looks like a monitor - if you select it, you can set the zoom, and zoom way in until you feel satisfied.
It's going to look like garbage, though, until we...
Part 4: Install the Guest Additions extension. This helps a LOT with quality-of-life stuff such as dragging and dropping files between both operating systems, changing the screen resolution of the Windows desktop, etc.
1. With the VM running, click the Devices tab on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Select Insert Guest Additions CD image...
2. Open the Windows File Explorer, and look along the left side for the D: drive. The button you clicked before "loaded" the virtual CD such that Windows interprets it as an actual CD inserted into your computer. Click on it, and double click VBoxWindowsAdditions. Follow the rest of the prompts.
3. You will probably need to restart Windows. Go ahead.
4. Run Windows Updates. "This will take a while. Don't turn off your computer."
5. Once your computer has restarted 82 times, you may want to mess with the screen resolution (under View > Virtual Screen 1 > [select a resolution]) and enable dragging-and-dropping between operating systems, which makes life a lot easier (Devices > Drag and Drop > [select a preference]).
Part 5: Run the Solar Fire installer. Dragging it and dropping it into Windows is lovely if you've enabled it.
Double click the installer, select the default options (unless you've got a better idea), and restart the VM.
Congratulations! You'll now be able to use Solar Fire on your Mac.
--Edited slightly for clarity because I have OCD
My computer recently kicked the bucket. (Yes, I tried valiantly to save it; the hardware is toast.)
I took this as an opportunity to go back to using a Mac, which is what I did for years and years. I am very happy with my decision (sorry, Windows people
). What I did was I set up a virtual machine and ran Windows 10 in it, and installed Solar Fire perfectly easily there. For those who are less familiar with this concept, a virtual machine is essentially a quarantined section of your computer's memory which is set up to pretend that it's just a separate computer entirely (although your computer, with its host operating system, will quietly manage it and pull the strings from the shadows). I have used Windows virtual machines on MacOS before, but since I recently set it up, I thought I'd put together a little checklist in case anyone else found themselves wanting/needing to pull this off.
It's not difficult, but it has been annoying because VirtualBox's documentation really sucks... but the software is free, so I guess I can't complain.
It's possible I'm going to miss a step or two here, and it's going to likely be a little different depending on the OS you're running and such, but the steps below would've saved me about an hour of googling if I had had access to them - so in that spirit, here you go.
Part 0: Here's what you need
1. The Solar Fire installer. This will usually be a file with named SF9025usa.exe or something along those lines.
2. A Mac. I am running 10.14 Mojave, but this should be basically the same for any of the most recent versions of OS X (macOS). If you're running the dev version of Catalina I have no idea what you should expect.
3. A Windows license if you want to customize Windows at all. You don't actually need this, but Windows will be unhappy that it's unregistered.
Part 1: Download the Windows 10 ISO. This is basically the installer for Windows 10 itself.
Here you go - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/softwar ... ndows10ISO
Note that this is free to download, because Microsoft assumes you're going to enter a license key later on.
It's probably going to yell at you for trying to download a Windows installer on a computer that it recognizes already has macOS running on it, but ignore that.
Part 2: Download Virtualbox. We're going to build Windows inside of it. Windows will think it's running on its own computer.
1. Get Virtualbox from this link; click on OS X hosts to start the download. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. Run the dmg that you just downloaded, and follow all the prompts. The defaults for each of the options are probably fine for you.
3. Click on the "new" button, and create a box that will be for your new operating system. Select Windows 10 and the bit version (almost certainly 64 bit).
4. Determine how much RAM you're going to dedicate to the virtual machine. (1024 megabytes is a gigabyte.) As far as I know, you can't change this later unless you delete the VM and start over.
RAM allocation is going to determine how fast (more or less) each of your operating systems are going to run - allocating more to Windows will make it run faster, but it will slow down your Mac operating system while it's running. (You get all the RAM back when the virtual machine is paused or turned off.) You can check your RAM by clicking on the Apple logo on the top left, and clicking "About This Mac." The value you're looking for is "Memory" on the info screen.
Most of you will probably have 8gb of RAM. If you've got more, great!
I set aside 4gb out of my 16gb for Windows. Windows 10 is a little slow on only 4 gigs, but it runs fine - I'm literally running nothing but Solar Fire on it. I would recommend this for most of you. If you're doing REALLY intense reporting in Solar Fire and have over 8gb to play with, maybe consider going higher.
5. Virtualbox will prompt you to create a virtual hard disk for the Windows system to live in. Select "Create a virtual hard disk now"
6. At the next prompt, select VDI (Virtual Disk Image) as the type of storage. The other options are just virtual drive formats that are compatible with other virtualization software.
7. Select whether you want to allocate a dynamic amount of memory (so it doesn't eat up your disk space until you use it), or fixed (which it claims is faster). I had space to play with, so I chose fixed.
8. Determine how much actual storage memory you're using. I set aside 40gb for the virtual machine to live in. That was probably overkill, but if you've got that much memory to spare, go ahead. The absolute minimum you can get away with is somewhere around 25gb.
Congratulations, you've created a virtual machine!
Part 3: Install Windows.
1. On the left panel of the Virtualbox screen, select the new VM you created.
2. In the center of the screen, click Display.
3. Set the video controller to VBoxVGA, and click OK.
4. In the center pane, scroll down until you see Storage. Click on SATA port 1, which should say [Optical Drive] Empty. Select Choose disk image. Select the Windows ISO you downloaded in Part 1.
5. Press the green Start arrow at the top of the screen.
6. Let the machine boot, and follow the prompts to install Windows. When it prompts you for a Windows license, unless you've got one handy, just select "I don't have a license" or a similarly named option.
The screen is most likely going to be horrifically tiny. We'll need to just grin and bear it through the Windows installation process, although if you look along the bottom of the VM once it launches, there will be a bunch of little icons. There's one that looks like a monitor - if you select it, you can set the zoom, and zoom way in until you feel satisfied.
It's going to look like garbage, though, until we...
Part 4: Install the Guest Additions extension. This helps a LOT with quality-of-life stuff such as dragging and dropping files between both operating systems, changing the screen resolution of the Windows desktop, etc.
1. With the VM running, click the Devices tab on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Select Insert Guest Additions CD image...
2. Open the Windows File Explorer, and look along the left side for the D: drive. The button you clicked before "loaded" the virtual CD such that Windows interprets it as an actual CD inserted into your computer. Click on it, and double click VBoxWindowsAdditions. Follow the rest of the prompts.
3. You will probably need to restart Windows. Go ahead.
4. Run Windows Updates. "This will take a while. Don't turn off your computer."
5. Once your computer has restarted 82 times, you may want to mess with the screen resolution (under View > Virtual Screen 1 > [select a resolution]) and enable dragging-and-dropping between operating systems, which makes life a lot easier (Devices > Drag and Drop > [select a preference]).
Part 5: Run the Solar Fire installer. Dragging it and dropping it into Windows is lovely if you've enabled it.
Double click the installer, select the default options (unless you've got a better idea), and restart the VM.
Congratulations! You'll now be able to use Solar Fire on your Mac.
--Edited slightly for clarity because I have OCD