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Thread: VBox - Creating a shortcut which launches a single program

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    Goron goron Kumagoro's Avatar
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    VBox - Creating a shortcut which launches a single program

    Hello vastly more knowledgeable people on VM stuff.

    How would you go about creating something like a shortcut which launches a VM and automatically shows one program open, so it looks like it just opened the program. I don't know what the terminology is so haven't hit much on google. I'm sure there is more than one way to skin this cat so any workable solution would be useful to look into.

    Ideally I would like a user to be able to launch the shortcut which shows the program on their desktop but is running on a remote machine. But just launching a local VM would be good enough.

    I will be using Windows and Vbox

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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: VBox - Creating a shortcut which launches a single program

    Launch the VM, open the program, save a snapshot of the VM. Then do whatever shortcut command you need to load that snapshot with your VM software rather than the base VM image (sorry I can't help with Vbox).

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    Kumagoro (12-11-2020)

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    Super Moderator Jonj1611's Avatar
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    Re: VBox - Creating a shortcut which launches a single program

    Can you do this :
    http://itswapshop.com/tutorial/virtu...tual%20machine.

    Then when the virtual machine starts use a batch file/autorun or whatever within the VM to load the program you want?
    Jon

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    Re: VBox - Creating a shortcut which launches a single program

    Quote Originally Posted by Kumagoro View Post
    How would you go about creating something like a shortcut which launches a VM and automatically shows one program open, so it looks like it just opened the program. I don't know what the terminology is so haven't hit much on google. I'm sure there is more than one way to skin this cat so any workable solution would be useful to look into.

    Ideally I would like a user to be able to launch the shortcut which shows the program on their desktop but is running on a remote machine. But just launching a local VM would be good enough.

    I will be using Windows and Vbox
    To start a VM from a shortcut, I created a couple of bat files within the installation folder of VBox that contained a command line, then I created a shortcut to each bat file. You could obviously do it a handful of different ways, like a pure shortcut to VirtualBoxVM.exe but a bat file gives greater control & flexibility. The command to start a VM looks like this from a command prompt / bat file:

    Code:
    start VirtualBoxVM.exe --startvm "VM1 Windows XP SQL 2008 R2 SP1"
    That will cover you for a 'Normal Start' of a local VM. If you want to go Headless, the last time I looked there was no available command. But one may have been included since, as I believe when I last looked it was part of a todo list. If Headless is what you want, I'll have another look into whether there is now a command, I've not looked since version 5 when Headless was first released.
    So that would cover you for a local VM.

    Assuming Windows is going to be the guest OS on VBox?
    When they Login to the guest Windows can you not put either a shortcut in the users 'Startup' folder or an autorun entry in the registry?

    EDIT: ok I misunderstood what you wanted when you just wanted to display one program, in VBox you want to install the 'Guest Additions' within the Guest OS, then in theory when you select 'Seemless Mode' it will remember that for future starts of the VM, so the user will be none the wiser that they're starting a VM.

    With VirtualBox I have yet to attempt starting a VM hosted on another machine. So I've not any experience of that. But hopefully some of this will help & point you in the right direction.
    Last edited by AGTDenton; 11-11-2020 at 08:39 PM.

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    Kumagoro (12-11-2020)

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    Goron goron Kumagoro's Avatar
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    Re: VBox - Creating a shortcut which launches a single program

    Thanks for the replies.

    I tried out what was suggested here and whatever else I could find with a bit of googling and in the end I went with just launching the VM via a desktop short cut. I did try out auto starting the program but felt that it was less user friendly and confusing for the user. So they just then start the program from a desktop shortcut in the VM.

    In the end though it didn't work with the HTML 5 Web RDP thing we were trying to use Annoyingly although key presses pass to the RDP'ed into computer fine but the VM running on it couldn't capture alpha numeric key presses, though weirdly space bar, enter, cursor keys, delete, tab etc worked.

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