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Known Participant
June 2, 2010
Question

FM and RH8 on Macs-VMWare

  • June 2, 2010
  • 4 replies
  • 1597 views

We are considering buying Macs and running FM9 and RH8 from VMWare.

  • Has anyone done this?
  • Are there any considerations to bear in mind in doing this?
  • Has anyone experienced serious issues on this?

Thanks for any comments.

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

Known Participant
July 14, 2010

TCS2 runs fine on a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and VMWare installed and with 4GB RAM. It does not run well at all in VMWare's Unity mode.

lcshrm
Participant
November 8, 2011

Haven't experienced the problems you mentioned (running TCS1.3 on a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and VMFusion 4), but I have experienced issues with Frame 8 crashing repeatedly. Anyone else had the same issue?

I'm looking at upgrading to TCS3.5, have a major Frame/RH project ahead that will call for me working both on-site and remotely, and would like to know if I need to consider installing dusting off my Windows box and installing it there instead.

--Linda

Mark Southee
Inspiring
November 8, 2011

I had major problems with TCS 2 (RoboHelp issues only) on a 2010 MacBook Pro (Snow Leopard) running Parallels and Win7 with 4GB RAM. For instance if I tried to manually add a new TOC folder, it would take over 20 minutes for RoboHelp to add the folder to the TOC.

FrameMaker seemed to perform fine.

I've not tried with TCS 3

Known Participant
July 14, 2010

I have been using the MacBook Pro for over a week now.

My Mac comes with OSX Snow Leopard. Using VMWare, it is partitioned with Windows 7. I have 4G RAM.

These are the following items I have found to report:

  • You can't run TCS2 in Unity mode in VMWare. It does work fine, though, with "regular" VMWare mode.
  • You can't share TCS2 files in the common folder used by Mac and Windows. You must have your TCS2 folder/files wholly in the Windows side of the partition. This causes some logistical delays and hurdles when sharing files between the two sides; e.g., pdfs, rtfs, and HTML.
  • You have to wait for VMWare to restart every time you fire up the Mac. This takes up to a minute.

Otherwise, all seems to work well. I will continue to update this topic as events warrant.

Known Participant
June 4, 2010

I found this entry @ a VMWare forum:

I am working with the new Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 which just runs under Windows. I need to import files from FrameMaker 9 into Robohelp 8. On a regular Windows computer this works without a problem, but not under Fusion. Under Fusion, an error message pops up telling me that an additional module for FrameMaker isn't installed. The problem occurs only with FrameMaker files. Word files or .mif files can be fine. Does anybody have an idea why FrameMaker files don't work?

Here

Anyone ever seen this problem? Is there a technical note about virtual environments and FM9, as someone on the Google forum suggests?

June 17, 2010

I am running TCS2 in a virtual XP machine using VMware player. Not on a Mac though. No problems so far.

Matt-Tech Comm Tools
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 2, 2010

I've been running TCS and TCS2 exclusively on Bootcamp, with no known issues, though I did have a problem with installing a Connect plugin yesterday (not sure if the Mac had anything to do with it, as it installed fine under XP previously on this machine)

VMWare seems to be popular, I just don't like sharing resources...

-Matt

Matt Sullivan

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