[avr-chat] AVR Studio under VirtualBox, anyone?

[Graham Davies]

Is anyone successfully using AVR Studio under VirtualBox?

 

My interest in this is (predictably) to overcome the problem that different versions of AVR Studio cannot co-exist on the same machine, but different projects require different versions.  To expand on the latter, updating to the latest version without a shake-down period is asking for trouble and, in any case, once a project has been started with one version and it is going fine why would you change to another version?  Also, clients sometimes specify the version they want used.  Picking some tried-and-true version and sticking with that come-what-may isn't so good either.  None of this will come as a surprise to the professionals out there.

 

My problem is that communication with the debugger is flakey.  I use both the AVR ICE-Cube (a JTAG ICE Mk I clone), which is serial, and the AVR Dragon, which is USB.  Things will be fine for a while, but then all of a sudden I'll get the communication lost with target messages and the only solution is a reboot of the virtual machine.  Sometimes this doesn't even work.

 

So is anyone successfully using virtual machine technology to run different versions of AVR Studio?  Does anyone else have a smart solution to this problem?  I don't really want to buy a PC and a Windows license for each version of AVR Studio I need to use.

 

For those that find AVR Studio itself flakey, I have not found this.  But then, I only install one version, ever, per installation of Windows, specifically to avoid the uninstall / reinstall problems that seem to plague this application.  Obviously, this means I spend a lot of time installing Windows, which I would like to avoid.

 

Graham.