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This document explains how to jump-start the analysis environment on a laptop using a virtual machine (VM) image. The recipe would work as well for any other hardware (desktop, server). In this document we're exploring a technology based on Oracle VM VirtualBox. The main benefit of the software is that it's stable and it's free. Besides, it's easy to set up. The software is available on all popular platforms, including Linux (all distributions), Windows 7/8, MacOS, or Solaris. However a similar approach would work for other hypervisors, such as Parallels, VMware, etc. They all would recognize a format of the Oracle VM Appliance which we're exporting here.

Preparing your computer

The first step here is to make sure your CPU has a hardware support for the virtualization technology. This is known as VT-x on Intel CPUs or AMD-V on the AMD CPUs. All modern CPUs built over the last 5 years should have it. But you would better check if the one you have 

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We suggest using the latest analysis release. You can find a list of most recent releases in the Release Notes. Note that not all of them would be packaged into the virtual images. Also note that not all platforms which we generally support at LCLS may be represented in the above mentioned collection of virtual images. And for well known reasons we can't redistribute images based on RHEL because this is a proprietary Linux distribution.Instead of that we replace RHEL systems with the corresponding versions of the CentOS distribution.

The next step is to download an image of your choice onto a machine where you have previously installed the Oracle VirtualBox software. Virtual image files will have the .ova extension. The OVA files correspond to the Open Virtualization Format which is meant to be used by the virtualization solution manufactures to exchange virtual images. Then you will need to start the VirtualBox GUI and import the VM Applience 

Testing and using the installed machine

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