Setting Up Your Virtual Machine (VM)

A Virtual Machine (VM) is a program which runs another operating system. This will enable you to do programming in a Linux environment, even though you have a Windows computer. Every step of these instructions must work - limping along with a half-working environment will be awful for everybody, so stick with it or ask for help if something does not work.

Installing VirtualBox

Open Software Center from Windows, and find and install VirtualBox.

Installing the VM

Make sure you have first installed VirtualBox on your computer.
Download the OVA image,
- If you are off the yard, you can go to the google drive folder Student VM Image on google drive and download the usna-ubuntu-v4.ova file.
- If you are on campus, please download from our servers using https://courses.cs.usna.edu/configs/usna-ubuntu-v4.ova
After it finishes downloading, double-click the usna-ubuntu-v4.ova file that you just downloaded. Then, you will see the following window pop-up. Choose VirtualBox Manager.
Click Import.
Once you are finished installing, it should look something like this:
To start the VM click on the Start Icron (Green Arrow). Then, your VM will start, and eventually you will see the following screen.

Note: enabling shared clipboard

If you want copy-and-paste to work both in Windows and VM interchangeably, you need to enable the shared clipboard in VM. Choose the following in Menu of VM:

Devices (top left), Shared clipboard, Bidirectional