ECE297 Communication and Design Winter 2017

ECE297 Quick Start GuideVirtual Machine

“Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.”–Larry Page

1 What is a “Virtual Machine”?

This document will show you how to install software on your home computer/laptop that will bevery similar to the software you’ll use in the course labs, on the UG machines. We’ve put togethera package of software that contains all of the software and tools that you will be using on the UGmachines. All this software is wrapped in what is called a Virtual Machine. Which is another kindof software that pretends it is running on separate physical computer. That separate computercan actually run a different Operating System; you are probably familiar with Windows 7, 8 or 10operating system or the Mac OS X operating system. In this case, you’ll be running the Linuxoperating system on your computer, regardless as to whether your computer’s home operatingsystem is Windows or Mac.

Once you’ve installed this software your computer will be able to (temporarily, when you needit) look and feel almost exactly like the UG machines in the labs. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of aWindows computer running a Linux virtual machine - a computer within a computer!

There are two pieces of software required for you to get this all working. (We will call the finalworking system, the ECE297 virtual machine. The first is a program called VirtualBox, which canload and run virtual machines. The second is the specific virtual machine that we have createdfor this course, which we will load and run using VirtualBox. The following sections will show youhow to get started.

2 Steps to Install the Virtual Machine

2.1 Step 1: Installing VirtualBox

Download and run the VirtualBox installer for your machine:For Windows:http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.0/VirtualBox-5.0.0-101573-Win.exeFor Mac:http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.0/VirtualBox-5.0.0-101573-OSX.dmg

!If this version does not work on your Windows machine because of “un-signed drivers” please download version 4.3.12 at this link: http://download.

virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.12/VirtualBox-4.3.12-93733-Win.exe.

You should use all the default settings when going through the steps of the installer program.Follow the next step before running the VirtualBox application.

2.2 Step 2: Downloading and Installing the Virtual Machine Image

1. You will need to download the following file (which is called a virtual machine image). Notethat this is a very large file - about 5 GBytes - and so you’ll either need a good internetconnection, or you’ll need to acquire it from the UG computers through a USB storage key.You can find the file under “/cad2/ece297s/VM/ECE297 VM.ova”

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ECE297 Communication and Design Winter 2017

! The provided VM image only works on 64-bit machines; it is unlikely thatit will work with a 32-bit machine.

2. Now, run the VirtualBox program you installed above, and in the screen that appears, selectFile > Import Appliance. See Figure 2 for a screenshot of this step.

3. In the window that appears, click the icon of the folder with a green arrow on it and select thefile that you downloaded in the previous step as the appliance to import (ECE297 VM.ova),and then click “Next”. See Figure 3 for a screenshot of this step (note that the exact locationof your file won’t match what appears in the screenshot).

4. In the Appliance settings window, use all the values and settings that appear by default, andclick “Import” to start the import process. This will take several minutes.

5. After a few minutes, the image will now be loaded into VirtualBox, and should appear asa Virtual Machine in a list on the left-hand side of the window. We will now “boot” thevirtual machine - which means launching the operating system which is what happens whenyou turn on your mac or pc - but in software. Click on the name of the Virtual Machine(ece297 debian) and then click the Start button (green arrow). See Figure 4 for a screenshotof this step.

6. During the boot process, you may see some messages at the top of the screen regarding “Autocapture keyboard” or “mouse pointer integration” being on or off, respectively. You can safelyignore these messages and close them once the boot process is done. You will know that theboot process is done when you are presented with a login screen.

7. After booting up, you will be presented with a login screen. The username is osboxes andthe password is osboxes.org.

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Default username is osboxes, and the password is osboxes.org.

8. Open Netbeans as you would normally on a UG lab machine, and SVN checkout your projectas described in the SVN quickstart guide.

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Make sure to use an “svn+ssh://” URL when checking out your project toaccess your repository (which is stored on the university network). svn+sshfirst connects to the university network then transfers the files.

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ECE297 Communication and Design Winter 2017

Figure 1: The ECE297 Linux virtual machine running on a (real!) Windows machine.

Figure 2: Importing the virtual machine image into VirtualBox.

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ECE297 Communication and Design Winter 2017

Figure 3: Selecting the virtual machine image to import into VirtualBox.

Figure 4: Starting up the virtual machine.

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