MCnet BSM Tutorial

Held by the MCnet collaboration at MC4BSM 2015.


Prerequisites

This tutorial uses a virtual machine. Please install Oracle Virtual Box on your personal computer prior to the tutorial. Due to time constraints we cannot assist you with setting up software during the tutorial itself. If you have questions regarding installation, please ask them beforehand.

Download

The virtual machine disk can be downloaded from here. Unarchive the disk using 7-Zip. If 7-Zip is missing on your Linux system, install the package p7zip. On Windows, download the executable from here. On MacOS, use the unarchiver.

Creating the Virtual Machine

Create a new machine with VirtualBox using the GUI. In the first step, VirtualBox will ask for the name of the machine and its OS. For the latter choose Linux -> Ubuntu (32 bit). In the next step, set the size of the memory. About 1GB should be fine. In the last step, select the virtual disk. Choose 'Use an existing virtual hard drive file' and open the *.vdi file you just downloaded and extracted.

Before starting the virtual machine, enter its settings and increase the video RAM size to at least 48MB (Settings -> Display -> Video). If you have more than two processor cores on your host system, allow the VM to use two cores (Settings -> System -> Processor). You must enable hardware virtualization in your BIOS to do this!

Starting the Virtual Machine

We are booting a lightweight Linux, which you can customize.

The login name is student, the password is 2015.

The keyboard layout can be set using the layout switcher in the task bar, or by running setxkbmap LC in the terminal, where LC is your language code (us, de,...).

Common tools which are installed include xterm, lxterminal, vi, emacs, gv, evince and firefox. If you need root privileges to install further programs of your choice, use sudo. Note that the package information has been purged, and you need to run sudo aptitude update before any other command.

Running the tutorial

Instructions for the tutorial are found here and in the ~/tutorial/ folder of the virtual machine.

© MCnet collaboration 2015