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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 for all popular platforms, including Linux (all distributions), Windows 7/8, MacOS, or Solaris. However a similar approach would work as well for other hypervisors, such as Parallels, VMware, etc. They all would recognize a format of the packaged VM images which we're exporting here.

If you run into problems while following the instructions below, please check the problems section below.

Preparing your computer to host virtual images

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If you have proper privileges for modifying the repository then you may even commit your modifications back to SVN.

Problems

• On a macbook, I could not find a "File" menu item to import the .ova image file. By double clicking the .ova file image, virtual box come up and digested it.
• When first powering on the machine, I cannot see anything. After scrolling the virtual image, I saw that the display in the image was to large for my laptop. However after logging in within the virtual machine, it adjusted its video to the proper size.

Final notes

• The default configuration of the virtual machine won't allow external login into the machine (one can'e do 'ssh' into the system). However, it's possible to give you machine a unique IP address to allow the logins. Instructions can be found in the VirtualBox documentation. And make sure you change the default passwords of both root and pcds accounts in your virtual image.
• Please, read the documentation on VirtualBox

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