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Folders and Organisation

Alex Genovese edited this page Nov 26, 2024 · 9 revisions

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.

Making a new folder

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

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.

  • If you want to move a folder from one place to another, it is best to use the [mv] utility as it will update all the file paths in the .conf file for you and save you a whole load of tedium and aggro.

  • To add sym-linked VM's to an empty folder, load up the target VM in qqX, use the [ln] option. The original VM will remain where it is. More details below.

  • Alternatively, the empty folder can become home to whole new distros. If you need folders, will you know the routine by now ...

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

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

Marking Favorites

As above, 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.

vm-folder-path

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 linked VMs

Something new to qqX 1.10 is the ability to add 'new' VMs to category folders, but Vms that already exist, and actually exist elsewhere ...

You will probably have met 'symbolic links' by now, especially if you are needing to use this as an idea. There's lots here if you need a bit more detail.

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 go to the VM selector and select and open the VM menu of the VM that you want to add.

In the utils menu, you will see the LN item [ln]. Follow the instructions and insta-magically you will have another copy of 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

This is an idea that I have been musing with. The basic code could be quite easy but the ramifications could be quite complex. Something for a future release probably though ....