Folders-and-Organisation

Marking Favorites

Open your file manager, find the VM that you want put at the front of the list. Set your address bar to text mode and copy.

In qqX, open the main settings menu and place the coordinates into a 'VM array'.

For favorites, you will need to separate the category folder from the VM name, thus:

VM_Array[0,0]="/media/xxx/Files/VMQs/MISC" ; VM_Array[0,1]="fedora-40-workstation.conf"

VM_Array[1,0]="/media/xxx/Files/VMQs" ; VM_Array[1,1]="windows-11.conf"

More notes are in the settings file.

Making a new folder

If you are using qqX for program development and testing you will soon find that a collection of 20 or 30 distros can quite easily happen ... As your collection grows, you will want to sort and prioritize so that things a easy to find when you need them.

Folders may be totally separate, even on separate drives. Or they may be simple sub-folders to your main one.

An empty folder can easily become home for completely new distros

Extra_VM_Folder+=("/media/xxx/Files/VMQs/ARCH")

Extra_VM_Folder+=("/media/xxx/Files/VMQs/UBUNTU")

Open your file manager. Navigate to where you want the folder and create it as normal. Set your address bar to text mode and copy.

Simply paste in the whole folder path into the settings file and you are good to go.

Moving and Renaming VMs

MV > If you want to move a VM from one place to another, it is best to use the [mv] utility.

RN > Is extremely handy when the distro updates, eg 24.04 becomes 24.10, or if the given name is not quite right.

• Both these will update all the file paths in the .conf file for you and save you a whole load of tedium and aggro

Making linked VMs

You may have already met symbolic links, especially if you are needing to use this as an idea.

Something that was added to qqX 1.10 was the ability to link VMs to category folders, VMs that already exist, but actually exist elsewhere ...

LN > To add sym-linked VM's to a folder, load up the target VM in qqX and use the [ln] option. The original VM will remain where it is.

Lets say that you have 30 distros, of which 6 are your favourite test machines:

You can now create a favorites folder, same method as above. But this time, instead of downloading, go to the VM selector and open the VM menu of the VM that you want to add.

In the utils menu, you will see the [ln] option. Follow the instructions and insta-magically you will have another copy of the VM that will take up zero space. Not only that, it will automatically update when you update the original and the original will even update when you use the linked version too.

In reality, there is in fact still only one version. The links are like 'spooky connections' or 'worm-holes' between events. What happens in one place will happen in the other. Those of you who are familiar with the concept will of course know this. 😉

Tags

The basic code could be quite easy but the ramifications could be quite complex. Something for a future release, maybe?