VIRTUAL MACHINES FOR CS78 - Santa Monica College

I will provide you one or more VMware virtual machines (VMs) to support
lab activities for CS78. Students can download and install them. All
students will thus  have uniformly identical known machines where
activities will reliably work. These are VMware virtual machines (there
are a number of other "virtualizers" available-- virtualbox, Virtual PC,
parallels, Xen, OpenVZ). The VMware program runs them. So to enable your
use of these VMs you will install VMware Workstation Player onto your machine. Your
computer is then termed the host machine, and these various virtual
computers you will run are termed virtual or guest machines.

VMware is required to run these VMs. It is available for Windows or linux
from www.vmware.com. There are several versions of it, probably all 
capable of running these VMs. Some versions are free, the simplest being
VMware Workstation Player. It has a 64-bit version for Windows and linux:

https://www.vmware.com/products/player/playerpro-evaluation.html

There is also a Macintosh VMware version, not free, called VMware Fusion.  
I have never done it but a cursory search online suggests there may be some way
for VMware virtual machines to be made compatible with the alternative virtualizer,
Virtualbox, which has an Apple version that is free.

INSTRUCTIONS

Install VMware Workstation Player, or use another version of VMware if you have one
already. 

When you install a virtual machine under VMware Workstation Player it takes the form
of a set of files on the host machine's disk. That fileset can be read,
i.e., the virtual machine can be booted and operated, under any compatible
copy of VMware. If I create a virtual machine under VMware on my computer,
install upon it an operating system and other software of my choosing,
then all I have to do for you to possess that identical virtual machine
is to transfer its fileset to you, for the consumption of your copy of
VMware. VMs are provided here as such filesets consolidated into .tar.gz or .zip
format compressed archive files. You need to
uncompress/deploy them, then run/open them under VMware Workstation Player.

Under linux, the tar command will uncompress these files. Under Windows
the free 7-zip utility can do so (http://www.7-zip.org/download.html).

With 7-zip, extracting the fileset from a .tar.gz file is a 2-step
process. First uncompress the .tar.gz and out pops a .tar file. Then
uncompress that and out pops a directory holding the fileset.

The machines I want you to use during the course are at:

Download and then uncompress these. For each, a single directory
containing everything will result. Move these directories under a
single directory; a common choice under Windows is C:\Virtual Machines

Run VMware Workstation Player. From its File menu, choose Open a Virtual Machine, and
browse to the directory containing one of your virtual machines. It will
display a file with .vmx filename extension. Open that file and a 
resultant new icon should appear in VMware Workstation Player's inventory list,
representing that VM. To boot this VM within VMware, double click its
icon (or, select it and then click on the green arrow icon. Repeat the
procedure for each of the other VMs (though memory constraints may require
you to close one to open another). 

When you power on a virtual machine for the first time and it asks you if
you "moved" or "copied" the VM, tell it you "copied" it. (That causes
VMware to dynamically auto-generate a fresh virtual MAC address for the VM,
and is insurance against possible address conflict.)


Login credentials:

CentOS-6.4
 student/c$l@bLinuX
 root   /c$l@bLinuX

Fedora 19
 student/c$l@bLinuX
 root   /c$l@bLinuX

Centos 4.3 min-gdb
 root/password

Kali Linux
 root/c$l@bLinuX

Windows XP
 student (no password)


Once logged in to CentOS or Fedora, you are in a character-based shell.
On any occasion where you have need of a GUI tool, you can launch a graphic
interface with the command:

startx &

If you boot in an environment where the host machine has access to a dhcp
server (you probably have one in your home network's commercial router),
that access is passed through to the VMs. They are configured ("bridge mode")
to ask for dhcp service and will get their own independent local address on
the same footing as the host or any other LAN node.

To shut down a linux machine from the command line "poweroff" or "shutdown
-h now" will work.


David Morgan
CS78 instructor
dmorgan@world.oberlin.edu