Linux Installation with VirtualBox

This page should be mostly obsolete, as you can run the lightmeter on linux-systems directly. This page is for reference and archiving unless you want to use Windows XP in a VirtualBox.

--GW (talk) 15:33, 28 April 2016 (CEST)

Example for installing the drivers under Ubunto 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) using Sun's free to download and us Virtual Box 2 to create a Windows XP virtual machine.

1. Install Virtualbox2 (you need the proprietary version from Sun, the open version does not support USB.
2. Make sure all users that need to run the Virtualbox are in the group "vboxuser"
3. Create new virtual machine and install Windows on it (e.g. from disk-image)
4. Start Windows and install Virtualbox 2 guest additions to make life easier: Click on the window of the virtual machine once windows is running.
5. Activate USB-support:
   1. 1 Edit /etc/fstab (you need sudo / root privileges) and add the line

   usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=<groupID_vboxusers>,devmode=664 0 0

<groupID_vboxusers> is the ngroup number of vboxusers on your system. You can get it e.g. by typing in an xterminal

   cat /etc/group | grep vboxusers

If it is 123 the line to add in /etc/fstab reads:

   usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=123,devmode=664 0 0

1. 1. 2 Take it easy and reboot the linux system (alternative in the above links)
   2. 3 Plug in the instrument
   3. 4 Aktivate the USB-support by looking for USB on your Virtualbox and add the

the USB device called "Microsystems .." to the list of USB-devices in your Virtualbox

• • 5 Download the instrumentdrivers [or the Skysensor-software by Jörg Weingrill, with similar procedures not described in the following] from this wiki, unzip it and put it on a USB-stick
  • 6 Activate the USB-stick in the USB-list of your virtualbox

1. Restart your Windows Virtual machine
2. Wait for the windows-hardware-manager to discovert the new instrument
3. Go through the windows installation and guide the installer to the Luxmeter_install

directory that contains the drivers

1. Finish installation with the windows installer
2. Copy the Luxmeter_run directory from the stick e.g. on your desktop
3. Go into the _run directory and Start Test.exe: A window should then pop up.
4. Push the [Start] button: the window will start showing time, temperature and the counts measured by the luxmeter (typicall above a million in daylight)
5. Push [Stop] to end measurements and [Beenden] to terminate the software. A file test.txt will habe been created that contains the measurments.
6. Rename (!!) test.txt to an appropiate_name.csv (see the section on the DB-upload for recommendations. Warning: If you do not rename the file, the next start of the instrument will result in a (mercyless) overwrite of whatever data you wrote because it creates a new 'test.txt'.