TwinCAT/BSD in a virtual machine 

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Hi Jakob.. I have TC/BSD is running on Mac using UTMapp. I just imported the ISO as a drive, set it to IDE and disk image and made that the first disk in the boot order, I installed to a second 15 gb IDE disk image. After install I moved the ISO image down in the boot order and after testing a few times just removed it, works perfectly. Thanks for the quality info!

"Learning is one of the biggest joys in life" and we, as ever, greatly appreciate you sharing that knowledge with us. Even for those of us with lots of experiance on other platforms, these videos provide a great deal of value giving useful ideas and experiance for Beckhoff, which is quite unlike anything I've used before. Thank you Jakob!

Thank Jakob great tutorial: just made this VM and I use it to test my code on my PC. I tested it on VMware on my Mac running macOS BigSur: it works perfectly. Great I use my Mac to simulate a Beckhoff PLC running XAR

Great video, Jakob. I have yet to try out TC/BSD and watching you do it is inspiring me to try it out soon. I do have TC3 installed on a Win10 VM using VirtualBox and will be trying to see if I can maybe get TC/BSD OS installed in Virtualbox. Have a good one :)

you saved me because I also use amd and it is frustrating with 0x 1024 you really save my day

I was trying to do this by myself first, but I failed miserably. Then I remembered you made a video about it. After seeing the video I realized it is much more difficult than I thought. Thanks for documenting this our lord and savior Jakob Sagatowski! You're suffering so we common folk don't have to :D.

Thank you very much for all the hard work and precious content you provide Jakob, looking forward to watch some more of this.

HOW DID I MISS THIS? Great video!

Hi Jakob, great video, as usual. Just a question, maybe naive: when you added the remote route to the BSD machine, you left empty the field with the fingerprint to compare with. How I can find it on the BSD machine? thanks in advance

I have managed to get this working with VMware Workstation Player 15 which is Free. I folowed your video until I got to the step where you set the Firmware type to UEFI. VMware Player does not let you access the "Advanced" options, where you set the firmware type. Solution: 1. Follow the guide in the video, but skip the step where the firmware type is set. 2. Try to boot the VM. it will fail. 3. Open the .vmx file in the VM directory with notepad . 4. Find "firmware = "bios" and replace with "firmware ="efi"" and save. 5. It will now boot, and you can follow the guide in the video for the rest.

Thanks. You show many setup tricks which would not be obvious. I wonder what customers TwinCAT/BSD targets. A quick search finds VMware Workstation 16 might be a virtual machine choice, but cost $149. Most Beckhoff CX processors come with Windows and TwinCAT license, so why change to a Unix OS? Is Unix better for security or perhaps an option for smaller CX processors instead of Windows Compact (formerly Win CE), though doesn't work with some Atom CPU's. Beckhoff's tiny ARM processors like CX7000 use a custom TC/RTOS, but probably not a Unix candidate since "head-less" (no keyboard or screen).

Hi Jakob, Great video. I had a dual ethernet port PC available and got tc/BSD installed on that. Works fine but the only think i cannot seem to manage is to get a connection to an EK1100 on the 2nd ethernet port (scanning for devices from the IDE). Any directions you know I should take to find out why/what is happening? Cheers!

Great video and great wrok Jakob, have you found any way to workaround the firmware error on subsequent boot? Also, we would use such a VM for our build server and automated test. I wonder if Beckhoff would sell licenses for such a device...

You assigned only one core to the VM sys. However, is it possible to run it with multiple cores (Tc/BSD will work as a usual PLC with multiple cores)?

Nice job Jakob! Do you have already experience with TF2000 on TC/BSD?

Thanks Jakob, for this. I created the VM in workstation V16 and had the same error on startup that required me to remove the nvram-file. I've changed hardware compatibility to support v11.x and I don't have the error anymore, it restarts without issues. Edit: Discovered it by accident, because I had to send it to a colleague who only had v11.x

thanks a lot for your work. wow BSD. great that Beckhoff will make us of this powerfull secure OS. Anyway. If your PC is to slow, may just your Windows is to slow. Give Linux or FreeBSD a try!!

thank you very much for such informative videos

Hi Jakob, thanks very much for your video, I will try out later this installation. I would like to know if you have tried to install additional twincat fonctions like OPC server or Database... thanks again!

Hello and thanks very much for your videos!! With the new 4026 release, do you think that is possible to run TC inside a docker container? I'm looking for a development environment, NOT for production at this moment ;-) thanks again!!

i think you'll see any IPC from beckhoff run this in the next year. the alternative is win ce and well that is really not an alterrnative.

Tack Jakob

Great stuff and something I've been trying to understand. However, what I would like to know is if it is possible to have TcBSD as the host and Win10 as a VM client? If so, can the XAE then be installed on the client and work without issue?

Also have a long time delay before open project. VisualStudio opens in second, but open project is still longer and longer...

Hi Jakob! I followed your steps but i found a problem just after the step where i have to delete the bootable usb related hard disk (once i had installed the operating system with the bootable usb). When i run the vm, i find an error related with "can't open '/dev/ada1p1" and "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: msdosfs: /dev/ada1p1 (/boot/efi)". If I create the usb bootable related hard disk again, i can run the TwinCAT BSD SO without trouble, but i would have always to keep the bootable usb conected. What could i do to solve that problem?

Hey, Jakob, I have TC3 XAE on a virtual machine (VB) and TC/BSD on another vm(VmWare). I can't have them see each other. Any trick?

tip top , thanks . first try 👍👃

Great video. But can't you just select the iso in the 'New VM' dialog window instead of creating a bootable usb.

Hello Jakob Sagatowski, install on VirtualBox TC / BSD steps: 1.- Enable USB2.0 controller, Enable EFI. 2.-you must add a USB drive and a BSD.vdi hard disk and with this boot and install the TC / BSD operating system You can't mount ISO to Virtualbox as it doesn't understand it properly. First you have to convert it to VDI format; [path_to_VBoxManage, usually C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage] convertfromraw [path_to_ISO] [path_new_vdi_file] In example: "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage" convertfromrow "C:\Data\TCBSD.iso" "C:\Data\TCBSD.vmi" Then you can mount it as USB stick in example (enable USB 2.0 controller). Also VirtualBox does have to have EFI enabled (System settings).

SO FRESH!

i had a much easier time installing this in vitualbox, just attach your physical usb and pass though to the vm, when it drops to a uefi shell after it fails to boot, type exit, that will drop you into the uefi bios, then you can just select to boot from usb, and it will begin installation.