Accessing a partition on the same drive from a VM

[fox]

Trying to access things between a Mac and Linux with partitions on the same machine is now difficult because the Macintosh now formats drives in APFS, and accessing that format from Linux is problematic without a pricy proprietary solution. Reading up on the matter, one solution presented was to create a Linux virtual machine on the Mac and access a Linux partition using the Samba protocol. So I did that, making an MxLinux VM on the Mac side. The Mac itself sees a Linux partition on the same machine from the command line, but cannot access the content. However, the MxLinux VM, whether done on VmWare or VirtualBox, doesn't see any of the partitions on the internal drive (an SSD) from gparted, other than itself. It does have access to the host partition (the Mac partition in this case) through the shared folders feature, but not any Linux partition on the same SSD. This is where I think that a networking protocol comes in, but I don't know how to implement this from the VM. Can anyone help me with this?

[Jason]

The Mac itself sees a Linux partition on the same machine from the command line, but cannot access the content.

A linux partition on the virtual machine or the real hard drive?

Also, I think the problem here might be that a guest VM is isolated from the host and any other guests. That's actually because it's essentially sharing the same networking adapter as the host. It "thinks" it has its own interface but it doesn't. Thus, the guest OS can't see the host and vice-versa without using a VM feature like the shared folder even via networking. It can't even see other VM guests. But, you can change the setting under networking in the VM settings for the guest so that it is part of a shared network with the host (and other VMs, if you like).

Here's the different networking settings in VMWare Workstation:

https://www.dtonias.com/vmware-workstation-network-types-settings/

However, I have a question. Do you actually need access to the partition or can you copy the files you need to a common shared partition between Linux and Mac? Because, that'd be much easier than doing the above unless the files (I assume they're user files/data here) are constantly changing and you can't get the OSes to automatically use this common spot. If you wanted to do this, you'd create a partition with a file system they both recognize. I know Linux can deal with exFAT (includes FAT16 and FAT32) and NTFS. If the Mac can handle one of those use that format.

[fox]

Thanks for the reply, Jason. I'll look into the VM networking settings. The Linux partition I want access to is on the same internal drive as the MacOS partition that I put the virtual machine on. There are a lot of ways I can accomplish what I want to do, including putting all files I want shared on my Google Drive. What I had been thinking of is using the MacOS more than I have in the past, especially for access to MS Office 2019. One of the big features I use in MS Word, that to my knowledge isn't available on any Linux-native office programs is tracking changes with the changed text in a balloon outside of the document, rather than it being crossed out within the document. This option makes it so much easier to read the changed document, and to see how it will be formatted. LibreOffice and SoftMaker Office don't have this option.

Right now I can use MS Word in Ubuntu through Wine or CrossOver, but the latest version that works reliably is Office 2010. CrossOver support for newer versions is mediocre at best, and still unreliable. There are other options for running a recent version of MS Word within Linux. I could put a Windows or Mac virtual machine on Ubuntu and run Office 2019 from there. For that matter, I could go the other way and put a Ubuntu VM on the Mac OS. There is an advantage to the latter in that all my iMac hardware components run from the Mac OS, but kludges like a sound dongle, an external mic and and usb wifi dongle or PowerLine are required because those internal iMac things do not work from any distro I have tried. But after all the way I've been with Linux, I would find it hard to go back to using the Mac OS as my main OS. Anyway, I'm just looking at options now.

[Jason]

It doesn't look like OpenOffice (the free office suite from Softmaker) does tracking changes like that, either. I was playing with it a bit. It tracks changes when you want to but it's ugly and hard with the crossouts like you have said.