Installing Campcaster on Windows using VMware Player

Although it’s a fair amount of work, it’s possible to install a functional copy of Campcaster on Windows. (Technically, it’s still running an entire copy of Linux in a virtual machine, but it may be useful for people who are interested in trying out Campcaster and Linux).

What you will need:

– A relatively new computer (probably best with one with a dual core CPU)

– The VMware Player application

– An Ubuntu image file. This is an entire, functional copy of Ubuntu Linux that runs on your Windows computer.

– 5 gigabytes of free disk space

Steps to installing

The first step is to download and install the free (but not Free) VMware player for Windows (it’s about a 400 megabyte download). You can download it here:  http://www.vmware.com/download/player/

Once the VMware Player is installed, you can then download an image of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” from this location (it’s about 900 megs):  http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1258

When the Ubuntu Hardy image file is downloaded, you must unpack it. You’ll need a copy of 7Zip if you don’t have one, but it’s a free download from here:  http://www.7-zip.org/ The unpacked Hardy image file will take up almost 4 gigabytes of space.

Start the VMware Player and select the Ubuntu Hardy image file. You must make sure that sound card support and ethernet support are enabled for the Hardy image. A window will open for Ubuntu.

At the Ubuntu login, you will have to supply the username and password that came with the image. In the case of the image file I used, it was user/user.

You will then have a fully functional Ubuntu desktop running under Windows. Then you can follow the steps to install the Campcaster Development Environment.

TODO:

– Update this page when the Campcaster 1.4 beta packages are ready.

– Check to see if and how multiple sound card support works (so far it has only been tested with a single sound card)

– Create a smaller VMWare image file with Ubuntu and Campcaster preinstalled (possibly based on gOS). This will require someone to have a full version of VMware Fusion.

– Figure out if the Campcaster web interface is accessible from outside the virtual machine

Notes

While performance is slower than under a native Ubuntu install, playout from Campcaster Studio is surprisingly responsive, with playout taking about 25 % of CPU load when a file is playing. Import seems to require the most CPU resources, getting to about 50 % of CPU load.

Make sure to exit other Windows applications that use sound, especially things like Skype, iTunes or WinAMP.

You can use the Campcaster mass import script to link to files that are on your Windows disk, but you must first enable shared folders in the VMware Player preferences. In the Development Environment, the mass import script is in src/campcaster/src/modules/storageAdmin/bin/campcaster-import.

Make sure the shared folders are not read-only, otherwise you will get errors from Campcaster. VMware Player mounts the Windows folders in the /mnt/hgfs directory, not in /media/ as might be expected. In this case, linking is probably better than importing, because it will take up less space.