How to SSH into a VirtualBox VM Using PuTTY for Mac

This article discusses setting up a virtual machine (VM) as a virtual private server (VPS) and accessing it using secure shell (SSH). This VM VPS can then be used to test configuration and software changes before deployment to a live VPS. A deployed VPS can usually be accessed using SSH, therefore using SSH into VPS running on a VM is good practice for a live situation. This test configuration should accurately reflect the live VPS, reducing mistakes when moving from test to production. This tutorial and guide shows how to set up a VirtualBox VM and access it via the SSH client PuTTY, replicating production world VPS access.

You should never test on live systems. Replicate the live system in a test environment. Use the test environment to try out new configurations and software. When happy with the changes deploy to the live system with confidence. Of course there is no guarantee that the changes to the live system will not cause problems. However, the chance of errors occurring is reduced. The test environment should be the same as the live systems so that changes have the same affect when deployed.

Using a VM is a good way to test a system without impacting a local machine. VirtualBox is a free application that can run VMs. This article uses VirtualBox to configure a VM as a test VPS.
A VPS running in the cloud can be replicated on a local machine using a VM. The first step is to create a local VM. Then on the local VM install the same OS as the one running on the live VPS.

Use Port Forwarding for the Test VPS Networking

By default port 22 is used for SSH, see a list of TCP and UDP port numbers in Wikipedia. VirtualBox can be configured to listen to a port on the host machine and forward any traffic for that port to a port on the VM. This is configured in the VM’s network settings.

To change the network settings the VM VPS must be powered off or suspended.  Or save the machine state with the VirtualBox VM window’s File then Close menu option.

With the VM highlighted in the VirtualBox Manager click the Settings icon or use the Machine menu and select Settings.

Under Network the Adapter 1 tab is selected, the default virtual network adapter enabled for the VM VPS. Click Advanced then click the Port Forwarding button On the Port Forwarding Rules dialog click the Adds new port forwarding rule icon. Give the new rule a name, e.g. ssh rule, the protocol will be TCP, Host IP address is blank. Choose a Host Port such as 2222, Guest IP is blank and Guest Port will be 22. Click OK to create the new rule.

Leaving the IP addresses blank means that if the host or guest IPs change then rule will still work. The host port should not be in use by another application or service (see the the Wikipedia list for common uses of ports). While 2222 is used by some products it is easy to remember as it is simply the default port 22 written twice. Use any valid port number in the range 1025 to 65535.

Install the PuTTY Terminal Emulator

The application PuTTY is a terminal emulation program, it implements Telnet, SSH and other network protocols. PuTTY can be used for remote connections to Windows or Unix type machines, such as a Linux based VPS.

Using PuTTY to SSH into VPS Running on a VM

Open PuTTY, start a new session, the Hostname is localhost (your machine), which is the same as entering 127.0.0.1. The port is 2222, or whichever port number was set up in the port forwarding rule. Click the Open button.

The first time PuTTY connects to the VPS a security alert is shown. Confirm that the VPS is the valid by selecting Yes (it is running on the VM on the localhost). By selecting Yes the alert will not appear next time. A terminal window will appear and if everything is configured correctly the login prompt will be available. Log in as root with the password set during install. Run a command such as ls to list the files in the directory.

Typing logout will end the session and close the PuTTY window.

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Working on Wine Part 3 Using Wine as a Developer

Andrew Eikum a CodeWeavers employee and Wine developer is writing a series of post to introduce people to Wine usage and development.

About This Guide

This is a series of guides intended to introduce software developers to the Wine ecosystem. It will cover what Wine is, how to use Wine, how to debug Wine, how to fix Wine, and what to do with your fix once you've made it.

The guide will be published throughout January.

• Part 1 describes what Wine is and provides a short description of various popular forks of Wine.
• Part 2 describes Wine's build process.
• Part 3 describes how to use Wine as a developer.
• Part 4 describes how to debug Wine in general.
• Part 5 describes Wine's source tree layout and how to edit the source.
• Part 6 describes how you can send your work upstream.

Now that you have Wine built, try running it:

    $ ./wine.win64/wine winecfg

This should pop up a winecfg dialog. If not, something has gone wrong.
The wine executable in the 64-bit build directory is your primary interface for running Wine. Use it to install whatever software you are trying to get functional:

    $ cd ~/software/MyFavoriteApp/
    $ ~/src/wine.win64/wine Setup.exe

 

Wine prefixes

On first run, Wine sets up a virtual Windows filesystems containing a C: drive and a bunch of other files to mimic a real Windows installation. The virtual Windows filesystem is called a "prefix." The default Wine prefix is located at $HOME/.wine/. You can override this location with the WINEPREFIX environment variable. This can be useful to set up experimental prefixes which you can destroy later without affecting other prefixes.

A typical Wine prefix looks like this:

    ./dosdevices/
                 c: -> ../drive_c
                 com1 -> /dev/ttyS0
                 com2 -> /dev/ttyS1
                 com3 -> /dev/ttyS2
                 com4 -> /dev/ttyS3
                 d:: -> /dev/sr0
                 z: -> /
    ./drive_c/
              Program Files/
              users/
              windows/
    ./system.reg
    ./userdef.reg
    ./user.reg

The dosdevices folder contains DOS drives in the form of symlinks to folders or special devices. When an application tries to open C:\some_file.txt, the c: symlink here will cause Wine to instead open $WINEPREFIX/dosdevices/../drive_c/some_file.txt.

The drive_c folder is where the contents of a typical Windows installation live, like the Windows folder and the Program Files folders.

The .reg files contain Wine's representation of the Windows registry. These are stored in a format similar to the Windows regedit .reg format. Rather than use regedit, you can actually edit these files with a text editor directly to modify the registry (though you shouldn't do that while Wine is running).
The application you installed is probably located in Program Files. You can change into that directory and go poke around its files, just like you could on Windows. You can also run Wine from that directory:

    $ cd '~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Steam/'
    $ ~/src/wine.win64/wine Steam.exe

If you are running applications directly like this, be mindful of your working directory. While many applications aren't sensitive to this, some assume that you launched it from the directory specified in the shortcut file that it created. This is not always the same directory in which the executable lives.

Running Wine from a build directory

If you run Wine from a build directory, like we have been here, then Wine will look up its library files from that build directory. This is as opposed to running from a system installation, where it will look up libraries in /usr/lib/wine, for example. This means that you can make changes to one Wine component, build just that one component, and then run Wine and observe the changes. No need for a top-level make or an install round trip.

Native vs built-in components

By now, you should understand that Wine is capable of running arbitrary software that was written for Windows. This includes software and libraries that Microsoft has written. Many of the components that Windows applications depend on are distributed with the application in the form of "redistributables," which contain Microsoft-written libraries. While these weren't intended for Wine, they are Windows applications like any other, so they do work in Wine.

Typically these redistributables drop DLLs into C:\windows\system32. When Wine is asked to load some DLL from system32, it will notice that these libraries are not Wine DLLs and will determine what to do on a per-library basis. The technical details of this are beyond the scope of this guide, but you can control whether Wine will prefer the Microsoft-owned DLLs (called "native") or the Wine-created DLLs (called "built-in") by using winecfg.

Since Wine tries to reimplement Microsoft code, these native libraries are by definition "correct." And unfortunately, Wine is not yet perfect. As a result, software running against native libraries will often work better than when running against Wine DLLs. This can be useful for end-users who just want to run their software.

However, you must be very careful when using native DLLs as a developer. Wine developers must never reverse-engineer actual Microsoft-owned code, and that includes using native libraries and using Wine's debugging features to determine what they are doing. There are no exceptions to this rule, so please understand the native vs built-in state of any libraries you are working on or debugging. Any developer found to be reverse-engineering in this manner may be banned from contributing to Wine. The correct way to determine the behavior of native components is to write software like any other application developer and test the behavior of those components as a black box. This will be discussed more later in these guides.

Fake DLLs and .dll.so files

On a Windows system, system libraries are installed into C:\windows\system32 (and C:\windows\syswow64 for 32-bit DLLs on a 64-bit system). Wine also installs DLLs into this directory. Some applications actually open these files directly and expect them to be valid Windows DLLs. However, Wine does not actually use the DLL file format for most of its own libraries. Instead these "fake DLLs" simply instruct Wine to load its real libraries, in whatever format is native to the underlying operating system (e.g. ELF).

As discussed above, Wine's libraries live in the build tree if you are running Wine from the build tree. They are named with the .dll.so extension. If Wine was installed someplace, then they will live in the lib/wine directory, for example in /usr/lib/wine and /usr/lib32/wine/. If you make changes to a Wine library and want to replace a single component in an existing Wine installation, you can just copy the .dll.so file into the appropriate location. Modifying the fake DLL in the Wine prefix will do nothing useful.

Tip: Virtual Desktop

Wine can be configured to run inside of a "virtual desktop." This is a single window, inside of which all of the Windows applications run. This can be extremely useful when testing fullscreen games, as this will prevent them changing the display resolution and you can still access other windows on your desktop. See the Graphics tab in winecfg.

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Working on Wine Part 2 Wine Build Process

Andrew Eikum a CodeWeavers employee and Wine developer is writing a series of post to introduce people to Wine usage and development.

This is a series of guides intended to introduce software developers to the Wine ecosystem. It will cover what Wine is, how to use Wine, how to debug Wine, how to fix Wine, and what to do with your fix once you've made it.

The guide will be published throughout January.

• Part 1 describes what Wine is and provides a short description of various popular forks of Wine.
• Part 2 describes Wine's build process.
• Part 3 describes how to use Wine as a developer.
• Part 4 describes how to debug Wine in general.
• Part 5 describes Wine's source tree layout and how to edit the source.
• Part 6 describes how you can send your work upstream.

Wine is effectively an operating system, including all of the libraries that a Windows system provides, such as support for 3D graphics, networking, audio, and a graphical user interface, as well as dozens of support libraries that software can use like XML parsers, file format readers and writers, multimedia playback, and much more. As such, it is a very complex piece of software. Building Wine is not a trivial task.

Much of this process depends on your particular operating system, and operating system version. This guide will not get into particulars for every operating system, but instead describe the process in general. Specific guides are available at the WineHQ Wiki.

Acquiring Wine

While you can grab the Wine source from many places, the only useful place for Wine developers is to clone the Wine Git repository.

Wine uses the typical configure && make && make install process of other autoconf-based software projects.

Choosing 32-bit or 64-bit

Microsoft Windows started shipping support for 64-bit software in the mid-2000s. Wine also has support for running 64-bit Windows software. The way this works in Wine is you effectively build it twice: once for 64-bit software and again for 32-bit software. Wine will choose the correct library architecture for a given executable at runtime.

Unfortunately, building for both architectures can be complicated on Linux. Many Linux distros have poor support for installing software for multiple architectures. Since most of the software that distros support is open source, and since open source software can be built for any architecture, there is little reason to support alternate architectures. However, the Windows software that you want to run is likely to require 32-bit support. Distros that do provide multi-arch support often do it only for Wine. To be blunt, that's a fairly small usecase, and so these 32-bit libraries are often treated as second class citizens.

macOS is even worse. Apple is dropping 32-bit support entirely sometime in 2019. No one knows exactly what this will mean for users of unsupported, 32-bit-only software, including Wine users, but it doesn't look good.

In any case, 32-bit support is required to run most Windows software, so it is effectively required if you want to build Wine. It is also strongly recommended that you build 64-bit Wine as well, since more and more Windows software is being built for the 64-bit architecture. This guide will show you how to build both.

Building Wine

By default, configure will run in 32-bit-only mode. To support both 64- and 32-bit software (called "WoW64"), we want to first build 64-bit Wine and then make a build of 32-bit Wine which references the 64-bit Wine.

Wine's configure script will search your system for the libraries Wine needs to run Windows software. It takes a while to run. At the bottom of the output, it will warn you about any missing packages. Any missing packages that are critical will be marked with WARNING text. You are strongly suggested to install these missing packages before continuing, or your Wine may be missing critical features.

For example:

    $ cd src/
    $ mkdir wine.win64
    $ cd wine.win64
    $ ../wine/configure --enable-win64
    [ much truncated output ]
    configure: vkd3d 64-bit development files not found, Direct3D 12 

won't be supported.
    configure: WARNING: libjpeg 64-bit development files not found, JPEG 

won't be supported.

You can see my system is missing the 64-bit VKD3D package. This is OK, since I don't care about Direct3D 12 support for the applications that I want to run. On the other hand, if I did want to run some Direct3D 12 games, then I would need to fix this problem and re-run configure.
However, it is also missing the libjpeg package. This is bad news. Lots of applications will require JPEG support and may behave badly if it fails, so Wine gives me a big WARNING. I should install 64-bit libjpeg and re-run configure.

Continue installing packages and re-running configure until you are happy with the missing package state. Then build Wine with make. A typical Wine build for a single architecture can take between 20 and 60 minutes, depending on the speed of your CPU and hard drive. It is strongly recommended to run make with a -jN flag appropriate to your CPU count. ccache will also significantly speed up future Wine builds. You can build Wine with ccache using CC='ccache gcc' at configure-time.

Hopefully your build will complete without errors. At this point, you can run 64-bit Windows applications. However, most Windows software does require 32-bit support at some point, often for the installer or some background process and services. So let's get a 32-bit build started, using the same process:

    cd ../
    mkdir wine.win32
    cd wine.win32
    ../wine/configure --with-wine64=../wine.win64
    [ much truncated output ]
    configure: vkd3d 32-bit development files not found, 

Direct3D 12 won't be supported.
    configure: WARNING: libjpeg 32-bit development files not found, 

JPEG won't be supported.
    configure: WARNING: libpng 32-bit development files not found, 

PNG won't be supported.
    configure: WARNING: libxml2 32-bit development files not found 

(or too old), XML won't be supported.

Oh my, far more errors here. You need to install the 32-bit versions of all of the same packages. How to do this, and what packages are available in 32-bit, is going to vary widely between distros, and we won't cover this here. Refer to the Wine Wiki for your particular distro.
Again, when you are happy with the state of your packages, run make and go grab lunch. When it's done, you will now be able to run 64- and 32-bit Windows applications in Wine.

Building crosstests

The last stumbling block is cross-compiling the tests so that they can be run on Windows. This isn't technically required the Wine testbot will build a patch file and run it on Windows for you—but it will greatly speed up your development process if you can build the tests locally and run them in a Windows VM that you control.

To build the crosstests, you must have mingw-w64 installed at configure-time. Availability will vary by distro. Run make crosstest at the top-level of the Wine tree to build all of the crosstests.

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Unofficial Wineskin Winery-1.8.2

The following Version of Winery I consider stable so I'm adding it as a release.

Functions on OSX10.8 > macOS10.14 including the EngineRepacking feature.
This was verified by downloaded and Engine and creating a Wrapper on OSX10.8.

Link to source code

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