Author: Jan

Convert a VMware Fusion virtual machine to VirtualBox on mac

I needed to convert a virtual machine created on VMware Fusion 9, to make it run on VirtualBox 5. To do that, you need to convert the virtual machine to the Open Virtualisation Format (.OVF).
These are the steps to accomplish this:

  • Locate the file of the VMware virtual machine you want to convert
  • Right-click and select Show Package Contents
  • Copy all these files to a new folder
  • Download and install the VMware OVF Tool. This is a command line tool that will do the conversion.
  • Open Terminal and execute the following command 
    ovftool <source image>.vmx <target image>.ovf

    The conversion can take quite some time. For me, it took about 3 hours for a 140 GB Windows 8 image

  • Once the conversion is finished, open VirtualBox and from the File menu, select Import appliance

After the import, power on the VM, uninstall the VMware Tools and install the VirtualBox Guest additions.

Turn your old iPad into a digital photo frame

So you have an old iPad (like an iPad 2), and you think it would be a shame to just recycle it?

Why not turn it into a fancy wifi-enabled digital photo frame? This is what you could do:

  • Create a dedicated Apple ID for your frame, and configure your iPad to use that specific ID.
  • On the computer where you store your pictures, create a new Shared Album, and share it with the Apple ID of your iPad. If you want other family members to be able to add pictures to the iPad, share the album with them too.
  • On the iPad, install the LiveFrame app. It is free for testing (you can view the picture slideshow for 5 minutes, then you get adds), 2,29EUR to remove that limitation.