UBDC Virtual Machine User Guide Stefanie Lewis October 14, 2014

Technical Specifications

The UBDC Virtual Machine (VM) has been developed to allow users to explore Big Data. It includes a few open-source data analysis programmes, including R and QGIS.

• Operating System: elementary-OS (64-bit) - Ubuntu-based Linux

• Storage: 8 GB Virtual Hard Drive

• Memory (RAM): 1 GB

Setting Up

Before you begin, please ensure you have installed some virtualisation software. We recommend Oracle VM VirtualBox, available here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads You will also need a minumum of 5 GB of space available for the VM. Make sure the OVA file is saved in a directory where you have sufficient permissions and meet the space requirement.

All instructions will be given assuming Oracle VM VirtualBox is being used. The first thing to do is to download the OVA file. To load the OVA file in VirtualBox, open VirtualBox, click on File and select “Import Appliance...”. A dialogue box will open - click on “Open appliance...” and select the OVA file. Click “Next”. This will take you to a screen titled “Appliance settings”. Accept the default values and click “Import”. Once this is done, the UBDC VM should appear in the list in the main VirtualBox window. At this point, your VirtualBox list should look something like this:

1 Select the virtual machine in the list and then click Start (located just above the list with a bright green arrow). Wait for the VM to fully load, and you should be welcomed with the screen shown below.

2 If you need any further information or assistance setting up the VM with VirtualBox, an online guide is available here: http://www.maketecheasier.com/import-export-ova-files-in-virtualbox/.

Getting Started with the VM

When you start the VM, you should be automaticallly logged in. Should you be locked out for any reason, the user credentials are given below.

Username: public Password: password

All commonly used programmes have shortcuts in the Dock along the bottom of the screen.

From left to right, the applications shown in the Dock are QGIS, R, Terminal, Fire- fox, Abiword, Gnumeric and a file manager (Files). Any other applications can be found using the drop-down menu entitled “Applications” in the top left corner. The VM is delivered to you with R and QGIS pre-installed. For more informa- tion on how to use these programmes, please visit http://www.r-project.org/ or http://www.qgis.org/en/site/ respectively.

The installed internet browser (should it be required) is Firefox. There is a word processor installed (Abiword, http://www.abiword.org/) and a spreadsheet tool (Gnumeric, http://www.gnumeric.org/).

Further Information and Troubleshooting

Should you encounter any problems with the UBDC Virtual Machine, please contact us at [email protected]

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