Home Virtual Machines
Overview
The CSE lab prepares a virtual machine image that, in a rough sense, allow you to take a lab Linux workstation home with you -- you simply boot the virtual machine as an application on your personal system. If you run Windows, you can have a Linux system running on it, without the hassle of dual booting (or even installing Linux!). (You can also run a Linux VM on a Linux box, as you might want to do that to insulate the two environments from each other.)
You want this VM.
It comes with a relatively rich
set of pre-installed software. Some pre-configuration has been done to make it easier to remotely
connect to and interact with CSE systems than it is from generic a Linux machine.
Additionally, because they are separate machines from the host system on which they run,
they are reasonably isolated from it -- instabilities in your VM won't clobber your native machine,
and (most likely) vice versa.
In fact, a big benefit to you of the VM is that it makes it much more likely that you can get help
from instructors and TAs if something goes wrong, because your VM's configuration is a
"known commodity," whereas your home machine's configuration could be in any of
roughly 210000 different states.
CSE home virtual machines can be run using software from VMware1. If your machine runs Windows or Linux, you can use VMware Player, which is free to everyone (in the world). If you have a Mac, you can run VMware Fusion, which is free to CSE students, inexpensive for UW students, and still pretty cheap for everyone else.
Preparing your home VM is basically a three step process:
- Install the appropriate VMware application: Player for Windows or Linux, and Fusion for Macs.
- Get a copy of the Linux virtual machine "image," which is simply a set of files.
(Download information is given on the VM specific information page.)
Because those files are the state of an entire machine, they're big, bigger than a DVD.
Your options are:
- If the target machine can be plugged into a University of Washington network, you can download the files directly to it.
- If not, you can bring a USB drive to campus, use a UW machine to download the files onto the USB drive, and then take the drive to your machine. (You'll need over 7GB of free space on the drive.)
- Boot the virtual machine and perform some very modest initial setup.
Next: Policies and Expectations
1 The VM images are standard .vmx/.vmdk files. This means that if you are already using a different virtualization technology (e.g. VirtualBox, KVM) you can most likely continue using it, although such usage is not supported.
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