I’m posting my experience with the installation of Xara Xtreme on Virtualbox using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). This undertaking has been in my thought processes for the last two years, but I just never got around to making the plunge due to a poorly performing Dell Dimension 2400 desktop peaking out at a startling 1 gig of RAM. Yeah, big whoops. Even with maxed RAM, the desktop was clinging to dear life as it crawled “desert-like” through webpage refreshes. It has now been decommissioned to minor network detail (aka storage facility).
Virtualbox, wow! Major improvements in the way this software handles new hard disks installations, and even better handling with Guest additions and integration features of mouse and keyboard. Big, big changes and overall smoother performance (and faster, too) than the freeware VM offered by MS. I had nothing but trouble with MS’s VM.
Moving to 64 bit Vista has a few drawbacks (i.e. software compatibility issues, but 32 bit Vista wasn’t any better). The 64 bit version has a slightly different tactic in recognizing driver files, etc, that I did not notice with the 32 bit version. In 64 bit, if your driver updates fail due to incompatibility or whatever reason, it comes back with a secondary prompt saying it didn’t download correctly “would you like to install the file the recommended way?” Heck yeah! Yes, please. I swapped an old driver file for an old webcam using a newer 64 bit XP version, and when the secondary prompt told me it failed, but would I like to try it their way, boy was I in for a surprise. It loaded the drivers, and now that webcam functions on 64 bit Vista (don’t ask me how, the website said Vista was unsupported). Anyway, that’s what Virtualbox came in to play for, to give additional life to my scanners and cameras, etc, by installing them through XP running on Virtualbox. No such luck with the scanners and other cameras, but they are working fine via XP/Virtualbox. Maybe I should try using 64 bit XP drivers for them, too.
I’ve seen quite a few YouTube tutorials on Xara Xtreme in the last year or so, and I’ve been itching to try it, but didn’t want to pay for the Windows version. So, I loaded Ubuntu, without any trouble, it was actually a breeze, taking all of 15 minutes to download the file, set it up, and install it. Loading Xara Xtreme was a different story, in my case.
There is the hard way to load Xara, and the easy way. Never mind the hard way, which involves trying to use the autopackage archive with Virtualbox. For whatever reason, the accompanying auto-installation file could not be recognized and it threw errors saying I didn’t have the required hard drive space (I had over 20 gig assigned to it) and another error stating I didn’t have the proper directory locations for the installation.
I went on the Xara forum, and the very first post I notice is someone explaining the easiest way to load Xara into Ubuntu. I wish I had read it 4 hours earlier. So, if you’re thinking of trying out Xara Xtreme and liking the idea of using Virtualbox with Ubuntu loaded, read this post first.
On my particular machine (64 bit Vista), there were only two minor differences in this process. 1) If you right click/Properties on the tar.bz2 file and go to Permissions (put a tick in “allow executing file as program“) under Execute option, you can double click the file to execute the extraction without having to use the code. And 2) is when installing the program from the terminal window, the fastest way to get the command to recognize there is an executable file is to “cd” to the directory you downloaded the tarball to (let’s say you downloaded it to a folder named xara), you would type “cd xara/xaralx/bin” at the terminal prompt and run “sudo apt-get install xaralx” (minus the ” “) and off you go. Once it’s completed you’ll find Xara Xtreme listed in your Applications/Graphics menu. I hope this helps someone down the line.
Good luck! 
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