Introduction
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
The next step is to make sure that the virtualization technology is enabled in the machine's BIOS. Unfortunately, we can't give you any specific advise on how to do so for your particular computer because BIOS implementations (and user interfaces) vary from one computer to another. The best approach here is to read the Owner's Manual of your computer to figure it out. Note that you may need to re
Setting up Oracle VirtualBox and extension. At this step you're going to install
Downloading and setting up a virtual image
The virtual images can be downloaded from the following location:
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
Accounts, passwords
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
Overview
Content Tools