Family Historian User Group

In A Tale of Two Laptops, FH v6 & v7, & Crossover! (19165)

Mark1834 wrote: ↑

24 Mar 2021 19:52

You are permitted to have 2 copies of FH7, so that will be your iMac and your new Windows laptop. When you activate FH7 on your new laptop, the Calico Pie servers should ignore FH6 on the old laptop.

It is important that you do not deactivate FH7 on the iMac, even after your new laptop is fully set up, unless you are certain you will never use it again. Deactivations cannot be reversed, so if FH7.1 is more emulator-tolerant than FH7, you will have lost the right to a free in-version upgrade in the future.

It’s worth also reading the Upgrading and Activation guides to get a fuller overview.

Sorry but that information is not correct for a Crossover (Wine) installation. The FH7 Registration does not 'see' the Host Computer (Mac) at all and it is the Wine-app that contains the FH7 secured registration info. So it should be possible to recreate another FH7 Wine.app on the same Mac computer and re-register FH7 if necessary, as it will appear to be installed on a completely different device.

Mervyn

Thanks Mervyn, that’s a useful clarification. Presumably the same applies to Wine under Linux? Somebody who has a spare second licence and wants to play with an emulator might be more inclined to go ahead if the host PC is effectively invisible.

Mark,

Yes it does also apply to native Wine installations in Linux. Wine.apps are of course 'frighteningly' large when first seen, compared with native Windows installations; e.g. my FH7+AS7 install is around 1.3GB.

Mervyn

Thanks Mervyn. CP's policy is to not say anything about how activation works (fair enough) and my assumption was that it was identifying systems with some sort of hardware signature, so looking through the OS to the underlying hardware. I know from personal experience that it recognises a system as previously activated even after a complete reformat and Windows re-install, so it isn't relying on information stored in the Registry. The Registry part of activation is presumably what FH uses when it starts up to confirm activation, as that works offline as well.

I don't know enough about emulators, Wine and Unix-type operating systems to judge how that might work in that environment.

Probably looking at the MAC address of the device, which is unique to the motherboard

Mark1834 wrote: ↑

24 Mar 2021 21:42

Thanks Mervyn, that’s a useful clarification. Presumably the same applies to Wine under Linux? Somebody who has a spare second licence and wants to play with an emulator might be more inclined to go ahead if the host PC is effectively invisible.

Mark

This is not the case; during the beta testing, I had to get a special licence from CP to allow me to test under a VM and PlayOnMac on the same machine and on Crossover on my laptop.

Colin,

I think it may be a bit confusing but for clarification my understanding and experience is:

- One Retail FH7 Licence = 2 possible Registrations;

- A Host Windows PC, or a Windows Virtual Machine running on a any system would use 1 Registration

- A Crossover/Wine installation on MacOS/Linux etc. system will use 1 Registration no matter what system it is running on; and carries it's own registration with it because the registration is recorded in the 'Bottle' and it is therefore not tied to the Host computer hardware.

- completely erasing a FH7 Wine.App (Crossover Bottle) is the equivalent of completely destroying a physical device which therefore frees up an FH7 registration which could be reused in another 'device' whether physical, virtual or in the form of a new Wine.App on the same physical system because the 'hardware' would be recognised as different.

Personally, I would be surprised if Calico Pie ever refused to allow the reinstallation/re-registration on the 'same' physical device as there are many circumstances under which catastrophic system failure might occur, which are beyond a user's control. But I would expect that those situations would need to be managed by direct customer contact because they are unlikely to be within the capacity of an automated registration system.

Mervyn

Yes that is correct if you uninstall one it can be re-used elsewhere.

I took the inferece from the above that you could have 2 installs on one machine and because the Mac address was the same then they would be regarded by CP licence validation as one device. This is not the case they are regarded as two.

Yes, CP confirmed when I queried it for writing the KB that the hardware deactivation is permanent, but they would look at making it reversible if there is market demand for that. I agree that they would be highly unlikely to refuse a reactivation if the circumstances were beyond the customer’s control.