This post documents the installation of an IDEA VE11 virtual box on a mac as done on May 14th 2018
Big thanks to Andy for figuring out how this works
Prerequisites
- Here I start with a already built images of IDEA on windows vista and mars on Ubuntu. the images from FMRIF can be taken from erbium.nimh.nih.gov:/fmrif/projects/SiemensIdea/virtual_machines/OVF/): IDEA_ve11c-mars.ova and IDEA_ve11c+vd13d+vd13a.ova
- Virtual box software can be downloaded here.
Importing OVA images into virtual box
This needs to be done for MARS and the Windows image.
Setting up network for MARS
Start mars in VitrualBox with a double click. It might take a while at the beginning with the following message. 
It gives up after a few minutes and you can login as root.
Open the network file with
vi /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
It might look like the following:
Remove the upper two lines and change the “eth1” to “eth0” and save it. You can remind yourself about the vi shortcuts here.
Then open the file /etc/network/interfaces with
vi /etc/network/interfaces
It might look like the following:
Reboot with
reboot
From now on the booting process should be much faster.
Changing VirtualBox Networks settings of MARS
Make sure that you select the Host-only adapter vboxnet0. In case it is not there you can manually create one by running the following command on the host
$ VBoxManage hostonlyif create
Reboot mars again.
Setting up Windows in Virtual box
Allowing virtual box to resize the screen.
In Virtual box, select the Windows image and go to Storage settings.
Setting up Windows network preferences
In the VirtualBox menu do the following:
- Select the Windows virtual box
- go to Settings
- Network
- Host-only Networks
- select vboxnet0
- click on the screwdriver
6.) in “Adapter”, change the IP address to the address from mars.
7.) in DHCP change the “65” too.
8.) Include a second Network adapter
9.) Reboot
10.) check the network preferences in Windows:
At the end, IDEA needs to know the IP-address of MARS. If this is not set already. it can be done in the IDEA console with
ExternalMArs true -ip 192.168.65.40
Setting up shared folder
In the VirtualBox setting, select the virtual box and click on settings. Go the Shared folder and brows to the path of the folder, you want to have access to.
After a reboot, it should be available as a separate drive:
