Pace University Course Virtual Machine Setup Prof. Lixin Tao 1/4/2022 Prof. Lixin Tao’s course virtual machine uses the latest computing virtualization and cloud computing technologies to bring university computing labs to your personal computer or laptop. Each virtual machine is in form of a folder of files on your computer. To run such a VM as an application, you first need to install VirtualBox (Oracle, free) for either PCs or MacBooks. This document explains how to use VirtualBox to run the course VM. To use the course VM, your PC needs to have at least 4 GB memory, and 30 GB available disk space. You can refer to my “Internet Computing Hands-on Tutorials” for information on how to use and set up such VMs. You are encouraged to set up similar VMs yourself with the help of my lab manual. Please note: By January 2022, recent Apple MacBooks with Arm-based M1 chips don’t support either VirtualBox or VMware Workstation, so they cannot be used to support course projects in this course. Both VMware and Oracle are working on a solution to this limitation of the M1-based MacBooks. This document explains how to set up the course VM on a Windows PC. Using a web browser to visit and download my Dropbox folder “course-vm-2020” at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujrp2zfei5rw7x9/AADzfdM8u-W4EwTwPYaQB612a?dl=0. The folder has 13 GB so make sure you have a fast and reliable Internet connection. If necessary, download the folder from a Pace lab to ensure Internet connection quality. Folder “course-vm-2020” has the following contents. Make sure your downloaded files have the same sizes. If not, your downloaded files are corrupted, and you need to download the files again. You will find my “Internet Computing Hands-on Tutorials” in file “Internet computing tutorials-v10.2.pdf”. You will also find file “resources.zip” that contains most resources for you to develop the same VM yourslef by following my “Internet Computing Hands-on Tutorials”. Software changes fast, and not all software versions are compatible. When you follow my instructions in “Internet Computing Hands-on Tutorials”, please make sure that you replace software download with the same software in my Dropbox download folder. Follow instructions in Section 1 of “Internet Computing Hands-on Tutorials” to install VirtualBox. For your convenience, the VirtualBox installers are also included in folder VirtualBox inside file “resources.zip”. You are encouraged to download and install the latest version of VirtualBox. If your are using Windows, create folder C:\share” for sharing files between your PC with the VM. If you are using a Mac computer, create folder “~/share” for the same purpose. Some servers limit file size to 4G, so I have split "ubuntu20-full.ova" into two files “ubuntu20-full.7z.001” and “ubuntu20-full.7z.002”. To recover VM file "ubuntu20-full.ova", simply put the two partial files in the same folder, install open-source tool 7z from https://www.7-zip.org if you don’t have 7z yet, and use 7z to extract file "ubuntu20-full.ova" from the first partial file "ubuntu20-full.7z.001". Follow instructions in Section 2.12 to import “ubuntu20-full.ova” (in my instruction, replace “ubuntu.ova” with “ubuntu20-full.ova” which is in my Dropbox folder “course-vm-2020”). Read through Section 2 of “Internet Computing Hands-on Tutorials” to see how to launch and shutdown the VM, enable shared folder, enable Internet access, and conduct simple operations in the VM. Now you are ready to work out course labs on the VM. You are encouraged to follow tutorial sections 2-3-4 to recreate the same VM yourself from scratch, using my ubuntu20-full VM as a reference. 2
