Brief Description
Ever find yourself setting up your workspace on another computer, at another job, wasting a day or two, getting frustrated by those tricks you forgot in the setup or finding new ones specific to that platform? I have that problem about 4 times a year. I’m tired of it. I have a workspace setup. My tools have very specific places. Regardless of windows, os x or linux/unix, I use bash (cygwin or the real thing), have my .bash_profile, my emacs install and .emacs customizations. I always install R with the same additional libraries. Having the same database setup would also be nice, but I haven’t really had a need for that yet.
Back in the day, when knoppix first came out, my thought was- wouldn’t it be great if we could create a bootable ISO ready for statistical analysis? And then came VMware, and it was mildly slow and clumsy on linux, but then I had the epiphany (in the crass monkey see, monkey do style), that a virtual machine would be just as good. Especially an ubuntu based on. Then I did a google search, and found jumpbox. And then I sat back, and said to myself, “Self, why don’t I wait for somebody to make some better tools to do this before I get to serious”.
And instead of just me, think of the educators who could use this. Imagine teaching a class is applied esoteric engineering where a big computing background isn’t required. You want your students to learn from the tools, not waste all their time getting frustrated with installation, configuration, maintenance, data importing/formatting/cleaning.
Specific Objective
To create an ubuntu virtual machine with all my favorite settings installed, so that I can just download it, install parallels/vmware/other, and be on my merry way analyzing data til the cows come home.
Product/Results
One day, there will be a downloadable virtual machine here that will work for me.
Status
Not Started; although I do have parallels installed and downloaded their pre-packaged ubuntu virtual machine. Root is ubuntu123 in case I forget…
Current Research
My wish list includes my current tool list…
