Can't get Gopro studio to work in a windows 7 guest on a Ubuntu 14.04 host

Question

I am running windows 7 guest on a ubuntu 14.04 host and am having problems trying to get the latest version of gopro studio to run. It seems to install fine, but everytime I try execute it, it produces a crash dialog window right away. It doesn't provide any error information, just the typical button to see if there is a solution at microsoft's site (which does nothing when clicked). This is a pretty barebones install of windows 7, other than gopro studio, it has firefox, commodo antivirius and a couple of other programs.

Has anyone else managed to get gopro studio working in a virtualbox VM? If so what did you need to do?

Solution

My guess is you probably did not provide one, or more, of the minimum system requirements the software needs to run. If I had to guess, I'd bet on GPU capability, or memory capacity.

Try searching the application's folder for some sort of crash log (look for .log or .txt file that weren't there), to see if there's an explicit error, but I doubt a memory issue would be evident, or even supported by the developers, once you tell them you're running in a VM.

You can try making sure your VM has 4GB available, and turn on all the GPU support settings in the VirtualBox machine settings, but ultimately, a VM is very much hardware-bound. If this software really requires a strong GPU and a lot of fast memory, it will either work very slowly, or crash in unexpected ways.

Comments

[user5013]

The vm has 12GB assigned to it. The underlying graphics card is an nvidia quadro FX 1800 so that should be good since it isn't using nvidia native driver. The only question is if virtualbox's video driver is good enough. I do have the virtualbox extensions installed as well.

[Traveling Tech Guy]

The underlying video card is usually irrelevant. You're essentially using a virtual graphics card. Even if you share a good amount of video memory, capabilities like OpenGL/DirectX are not always transferable.

[Fiasco Labs]

Virtual Machine = Virtual Hardware. Host graphics card doesn't matter, virtual graphics card does.

[user5013]

Well if you run a Windows guest on a Windows host, then the program does work. I suspect this is because the VM uses the native graphics driver on the host.