Smokeball on Mac

  • 21 June 2022
  • 7 replies
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atharkhan
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Continuing this from the prior Community: 

 

I have now attempted to install Smokeball on an M1 (ARM) Mac.  It does not work because the regular version of Windows does not work in VMWare Fusion or Parallels.  Because of the underlying ARM chip (M1) only the ARM version of Windows can be used.  Smokeball does not work on that.  I ran into the same issue with Smokeball on the Surface Pro X which is also ARM based. 

 

Smokeball Billing is available through Chrome (not Safari) and Edge (which is based on Chromium).  I believe there is a website through which you can use Smokeball Communicate but I do not remember the website and I have not made it work yet.  

 

If anyone has any experience with Smokeball on an M1 Mac, please let me know.

-Athar.
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7 replies

Javier Rodriguez
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Hi Athar,

 

I’ll leave the conversaton about using Windows/Smokeball on an M1 Mac to those who may have experience with it but I wanted to pop in and say that the website to use Communicate is communicate.smokeball.com 

 

As a reminder, you can also use Communicate through our mobile app available on iOS and Android.

Cheers!

Javier R. (he/him)
Ben
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Hi @atharkhan thank you for “carrying the torch” of this topic across to the new community. This is an unusual use case currently, however I think that will change as more native Windows devices move on to ARM based chip-sets.  

I’ve pinged the team here at Smokeball to see if they can share more on our thoughts on compiling for ARM in the future. 

I know it’s not ideal, but I’m wondering if you’ve explored using Smokeball on an Azure VM (or similar) or using Remote Desktop to an x86 device that you have Smokeball installed on?  

atharkhan
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Hi @Ben -- I believe that Smokeball will eventually support Windows for ARM anyway because, now that Apple has pushed the M1 narrative so hard, everyone is suddenly into ARM as opposed to X86. Apple has not released an ARM version of Bootcamp so I do not expect dual booting to be an option right now. 

 

For now, it would be really nice if the iOS apps for Smokeball were allowed on the M1 platform. I believe the only way to do it right now is to “sideload” them but I have not tried it. 

 

I have tried using Smokeball both on an Azure VM (or “Cloud PC” -- which Microsoft was giving away for free for a while) and via RDP and Fluid (JumpDesktop).  Latency was an issue in each case even when the computers were on the same subnet. Also, since a lot of these protocols reduce the number of keystrokes and mouse movements being transmitted, I always wonder whether Smokeball’s Activity Intelligence would work okay.  (I have heard of but have not tried ShadowPC which is supposed to be a very low latency cloud based PC -- I just don’t buy the premise.)

 

Please let us know if there is a way to get Smokeball to work on Windows for ARM and whether the iOS apps may be allowed on the M1 platform. 

-Athar.
atharkhan
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Update: I am trying Smokeball on a middle tier Windows Cloud PC with 2 virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of space.  It is their middle tier which runs about $60 per month.  The overall experience is pretty sluggish even though their network speeds are very good. 

-Athar.
M

I have the M1 and I am running Smokeball. You need to purchase https://www.parallels.com/ and then install Windows 11 on Arm, which parallels will do automatically. After that you can install Smokeball on the Windows 11 installation. 

 

It works well for me, some issues here and there, but does everything I need. 

atharkhan
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I don’t know if there is anything special that you did with Windows11 for ARM.  I tried it multiple times, and the installation kept failing at step four.

 

Maybe the mistake I am making is that I am using the auto downloaded version of Windows11 in Parallels.  Maybe if I installed it from scratch using an ISO, it would go better.  
 

Will try it out and report back. 

-Athar.
atharkhan
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Update for @Ben and @mshakouri -- I tried to install Smokeball on Windows for ARM via Parallels and it worked on the newest build.  I am pretty sure that Smokeball has not changed anything so it must be something that I was doing wrong before.  Parallels does download the latest Windows build.  So, it is possible that something changed there. 

 

(Side note:  I tried to install it on Windows for ARM on a Surface Pro X and it failed with an error like “Can’t find C:\Program Files” even though it clearly exists.)

Ultimately, it would be really nice to use the Smokeball iOS apps and Smokeball itself on Mac.  But, for now, I guess I am all set. 

-Athar.
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