CGWAS 2015

The hands-on exercises each afternoon will involve computational exercises. For this, you will need a laptop. It should run either Mac OS, Linux, or Windows. No special software is needed, because we have prepared a special CGWAS flavor of Linux (based on the Debian distribution) that you will run in a virtual machine hosted by your operating system. Below we provide instructions on how to install the virtual machine software and get the CGWAS machine image.

We thank Roland Haas and Philipp Mösta for their kind help with the CGWAS virtual machine!

Computing Problems? Come to the Computing Help Session!

CGWAS Virtual Machine Setup

Getting the virtual machine going requires two steps. First you will install the free Oracle VirtualBox software. Then you will download the CGWAS machine image and set it up inside VirtualBox.

Downloading and Installing VirtualBox

• Linux:  You can download binary packages for many Linux distributions from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads. But most Linux distributions will allow you to install VirtualBox via their package management system. For Ubuntu, for example, the required packages are virtualbox, virtualbox-dkms, and virtualbox-qt.
• Mac OS:  Download the OS X VirtualBox package http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.28/VirtualBox-4.3.28-100309-OSX.dmg. Open the package, run the installer and follow the instructions.
• Windows:  Download the Windows package: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.28/VirtualBox-4.3.28-100309-Win.exe. Run the installer and follow the instructions.

The online user manual might be helpful for a detailed explanation of how to install and setup VirtualBox.

Getting and Installing the CGWAS Machine

Now download the CGWAS machine: CGWAS Virtual Machine Image. (1 GB)
At CGWAS, we will provide copies of the CGWAS virtual machine image on USB flash storage devices. This will make it faster to install the official version.

Next, you will need to install the virtual machine (also called "appliance") inside VirtualBox. Full instructions can be found on the VirtualBox webpage. In a nutshell:

• Open the VirtualBox GUI manager
• Click on the "File/Import Appliance..." menu
• In the dialog box click on "Open Appliance" and open the file CGWAS32-2015.ova
• Click on Next accepting all defaults. This will create a virtual machine CGWAS32.
• (Optional) Click on the "Shared folder" panel in the in the right-hand half of the VirtualBox Manager to add a local folder to share with the virtual machine. It should be visible automatically when you (re)start the VM and will appear in the ''media'' folder on the Desktop.
• Start the appliance.

Username and password

The user name and password are both cgwas which is also that password for the root user.

Exchanging data between host and virtual machine

• Clipboard content copied and pasted via Ctrl-C (or Command-C on OSX) and Ctrl-V is shared among host and virtual machine.
• Depending on the version of virtualbox used on the host you can use "Shared folders". To do so (if you did not already create one when setting up the virtual machine) use the "Devices/Shared Folders Settings..." menu to create one. You can make it available inside of the virtual machine it by either rebooting your virtual machine or by using the MountSharedFolders.sh script that you can find on the Desktop of your virtual machine. The shared folder will appear in the media folder on the Desktop.
• The virtual machine is reachable via ssh (and scp) by doing ssh -p 2222 cgwas@127.0.0.1 and using the password cgwas OSX and Linux usually include an ssh client in their default installation, for Windows you can use PuTTY and WinSCP.
• If all else fails you can send yourself emails and use a web-based email client or services like dropbox to transfer data.

CGWAS is supported by the National Science Foundation under CAREER award PHY-1151197, by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, by LIGO Laboratory at Caltech, and by Caltech.