Content Comparison

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1. You have to configure the VM (the *.vbox XML file) using the GUI configuration tool Virtualbox Manager to have two SATA disks, one for the OS and one for the SandboxSandboxData.
2. You then have to configure boot the OS and configure it to mount the second disk to SandboxData disk and its file system as a directory in a well known mount point. This uses path. Search for the "disksDisks" GNOME utility which is an easy to use way of changing the /etc/fstab file.
3. Because the "well known mount point" may change from OS to OS, it is safest to create a symlink to the SandboxData from some directory that will never change to the well known mount point on that system. Then if Eclipse and all other tools are configured to use the symlink path, that configuration is guaranteed to work all the time.

In Windows you just make the SandboxData look like it is the R: disk.

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1. The smaller "VBOX HARDDISK" that is device /dev/sdb1 should be configured to mount at boot time. Edit Mount Options and curiously turn "Automatic Mount Options" OFF and then type in a mount point. This will create a line in fstab of the form "/dev/disk/by-uuid/6a61a74b-df34-4038-bc70-ee6cf02d5cf0 /media/SandboxData auto ..."
2. Although you could then configure everything to use "/media/SandboxData/...", this path seems like it might become a problem if the operating system chooses to make it so. The safe move is to create a completely system independent mount point that is a symlink to /media/SandboxData now but which could be changed later on if necessary. Since you are the system administrator, "/sb" (in the root directory) is a convenient and easy to type choice.

In Windows you just make the SandboxData look like it is the R: disk.

There are several ways to accomplish the same thing in Windows and Linux. The choices all derive from two ambiguities:

• Linux and Windows both support multiple users, but in practice only one person typically logs on. Still the system has provision for there to be another user and that has an effect on disk mounts.
• Some disks are transient (USB flash drives) and some are permanent (a SATA hard disk installed inside the computer).

Since Linux cannot automatically decide if a disk belongs to one user or is supposed to be shared, and whether it can be dismounted and replaced or is mounted permanently, it is up to the users and administrators to configure things appropriately. Generally Linux will default in favor of the single user transient model (the USB flash drive) unless it is told otherwise.

While it is possible to switch from one software project to another by keeping the same OS disk and changing SandboxData disks, it is unreasonable to expect to do this without rebooting. That is, we do not intend to configure the Sandbox VMs to believe that SandboxData is a USB disk that you can eject and replace with another disk.

In Fedora, if user "casdev" mounts a disk then the mount point defaults to being something in the transient "/run" directory that is tied to the userid that mounted it. Specifically, the default location is /run/media/casdev/SandboxData. Ubuntu, however, uses a somewhat older standard where mounted CD drives were associated with /media/cdrom and so it wants to mount the same disk as /media/SandboxData.

Fedora defaults to mounting new disks in a personal transient way. It would create a mount point named /run/media/casdev/SandboxData (for user "casdev"). The /run directory holds things that changed since the system booted up, so this path implies something quite temporary.

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