HP Prime Connectivity software in Virtualbox/wine

[Chris Pem10]

Just a heads-up to any non-Windows users...

VirtualBox:

The Prime Connectivity Kit and Prime Emulator both work as expected in Windows XP running in VirtualBox. I can communicate with both the real and emulated Primes this way.

WINE:

The Prime Connectivity Kit and Prime Emulator both run under WINE... but you cannot communicate with a physical Prime via usb. You can however communicate between the emulated Prime and the Kit.

All the above tested in a rhel 6.4 clone.

[Cristian Arezzini]

Yes, Virtualbox is good at managing USB peripherals.
Unfortunately, besides the low speed if one doesn't have a modern computer, you still need to obtain and install a whole copy of Windows. Wine would be much better because it's much faster and it doesn't require Windows at all...

[Chris Pem10]

I have only two issues with wine so far. Of course it has no usb connectivity, so you cannot use it with a real Prime. Second, I cannot get the Connectivity software to use a suitable font in wine. It is defaulting to a tiny cursive-like font that is not readable. I might look into that sometime. Otherwise, wine seems sufficient.

I wonder what the system requirements for the two programs are? If it's just Windows 95/NT/2000, almost everybody has an old copy of those lying around. Just disable networking in the emulator, for security reasons, and have fun. That's how I run my old AutoCAD in Linux.