vGate (virtual Gate)

Figure 1: vgate_scshot_little

Fig. 1 VGate

Generalities

What is vGate?

vGate stands for Virtual Gate. It is a complete virtual machine running an Ubuntu 32 or 64 bits operating system and made using the free software Virtual Box. This virtual machine can be run on any host machine (Linux, Windows, MacOS, …) (32 or 64 bits) provided the Virtual Box program is installed and ready for use.

With vGate you can launch your first GATE simulation in just a few steps! No need to install anything, no need to configure anything, and no time spent to understand compilation and related stuff. A full Linux environment is totally set up to be able to use GATE just by launching a simple command: “Gate”.

How to get vGATE now?

Go to the OpenGate collaboration website. You will then be able to download the virtual machine under the “Download/vGATE” menu.

Be aware that the file you will download a pretty big (about 2 Gbytes), so if several users are downloading the file at the same time, your download speed will be limited and you will have to be patient.

The file to download is a “.7z” file, it is a file that has been compressed using the program 7-zip (that is free, open-source, and that can be easily installed on any operating system). So you have to decompress your file and then you get a “.vdi” file which is a VDI file (Virtual Disk Image). This is the file to be used with the Virtual Box software.

The program can be found in Debian-based distributions in the ‘p7zip-full’ package. It should be approximately the same on Red-Hat based distributions. On Windows or Mac, automatic installer can be found.

With Linux, just use the following command to decompress the file:

7za x the_file.7z

If using other operating systems, probably just right-click on the file and click on the 7-zip menu and then decompress or something similar.

How to use vGATE now?

As the vGate machine has been built using the Virtual Box software, you will have to install this software on your host machine first. And since the version of Virtual Box used to build vGate was the release 3.1.2, you have to install at least this version to be able to run the virtual machine.

Once Virtual Box is installed, here are the steps to get your virtual machine working:

  • Launch Virtual Box and click on “New” to create a new virtual machine.
  • Click on “Next”, and give a name to your machine.
  • Choose ‘Linux’ as Operating System, and ‘Ubuntu’ as Version. If you are asked to, precise 64 bits system. Click on “Next”.
  • Select the amount of RAM that you want to give to the virtual machine (at least 1Go if possible, the higher the better). Click on “Next”.
  • Select “Use existing hard disk” and then go in the menu on the right, click on “Hard drive” “Add” and find the VDI file that you have just downloaded. Click on “Next”.
  • Click on “Finish”, and you can change settings of your virtual machine and start it.
  • The only user in the machine is named “gate” and its associated password is “virtual”.

That’s it!

How can I find and launch GATE in vGate?

Everything is already configured in the virtual machine to be able to launch GATE without any difficulty. If you want to know how the machine has been configured, you can find all information inside the virtual machine.

Once you start the virtual machine, you will have on your Desktop an icon to launch the web browser Firefox. When you double-click on this icon, Firefox is directly showing the documentation pages (in HTML) that are inside the virtual machine. So please refer to this documentation.

Any additional questions can be posted on the gate-users mailing-list.

Miscellaneous

How to get my keyboard properly working?

As the keyboard type is automatically detected during the Ubuntu installation, it is for the moment adapted for the person how build the virtual machine! It could be annoying.

So if you want your keyboard to work properly, proceed as follows:

  • Go into the “System” menu, then in “Preferences” and finally in “Keyboard”.
  • Go in the “Layout” tab and choose the appropriate layout corresponding to your keyboard.

It should work now.

How to get the network working in my virtual machine?

There is several ways to get a network connection in the virtual machine. This strictly depends on the characteristics of the network of the host machine (public network, private network, dhcp server policy, dynamic IP, static IP, …). So ask your network administrator or yourself if your are the administrator.

Once you get this information, then you can read the Virtual Box documentation concerning the network section, or at least see the proposed solutions in the machine settings menu. As they say: “In most cases, this default setup will work fine for you.”!

How to transfer files from the virtual machine to my actual machine?

There are several solutions:

  • Configure a shared directory between the host and the guest machine. This is explained in the Virtual Box documentation, so please read this documentation section on Folder Sharing.
  • In case of a connection on a network including machines that you own, you can establish a NFS (Network File System) to be able to mount an existing filesystem of another machine in your virtual machine. Again you can read documentation on that by searching for NFS (documentation for Ubuntu).
  • If you have an internet connection, you can use FTP access (using FileZilla for example) on an external FTP server on which you have access.
  • At least you can send your files via email!

How to minimize the size of the VDI (Virtual Disk Image)?

First you have to force a fsck (FileSystem Check) of your guest system to have all data arranged at the beginning of the virtual disk. To do that you have to create an empty file named “forcefsck” at the root level (/), using:

sudo touch /forcefsck

Then you can reboot the virtual machine and the fsck will be forced at the boot time. Depending on the space used in your disk, it can take some time.

Once the machine is rebooted, we have to fill all remaining free space with 0 (zero) value. To do this, just run the following command until there is no free space at all:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dd_zero_file

It can take a while because it will create a file with the size of the total free space before you run the command.

Be aware that the size of the VDI of the virtual machine in your host machine will grow too ! (but not necessarily linearly)’

It will grow to the maximum allowed size of the dynamic VDI (default is 20Gbytes).

So check your free space.

Once it is done, just remove the created “dd_zero_file” file and shutdown the virtual machine and also the Virtual Box program. Then in your host system, just open a terminal, go in the directory where your VDI file is, and use the following command to finally compress your VDI file:

sudo VBoxManage modifyvdi /absolute/path/to/your/image.vdi compact

It will also take a while, but after that, your VDI file will be smaller than initially.

How to update the maximum allowed size of my VDI to a bigger one?

To do that, the trick is to do as if you wanted to add a new physical hard drive disk (HDD) to your computer. Every step will be the same except that instead of adding a real HDD, we will add a virtual HDD.

Here are the steps to have more space into your virtual machine:

  • The first step is to create a new virtual disk image (VDI). To do that go in Virtual Box in the “File” menu and click on “Virtual Media Manager”. Click on “New” to create the VDI, choose a dynamic disk, give it a name, a size, and click on “Finish”.

  • Then shutdown your machine if it is running, and go into the “Settings” menu. Go into the “Storage” section and click on the “Add Hard Disk” icon. And add your new VDI that you have just created (automatically done in most cases).

  • Now turn your virtual machine on. And open a terminal.

  • Type the following command:

    ls -l /dev/sd*

    You will see your new device that appears under a name sdX, where X will be the next letter in alphabetical order after the last disk you inserted in your system. So if it is the first time you do that, your disk will be sdb.

  • The next step is to create a partition in this new disk. We will use the fdisk program. So type the following command:

    sudo fdisk /dev/sdX (where X is the appropriate letter of your disk)

  • Then in the fdisk menu, you can type m to get the list of commands. In our case, type n to create a new partition, select ‘primary partition’ as number 1. Then let the default values to get a full partition on the whole disk.

  • Once it is done, type w to write the partition table. The program fdisk will exit on finish.

  • Now you have to format your new partition. This partition appears in dev/ as sdX1. To do that, use the following command:

    sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1 (again where X is the appropriate letter of your disk)

  • Your disk is ready for use, you just have to mount it somewhere to use it. For example if we want to have this disk in /mnt/ (usual way to do) with the name my_new_disk, proceed as follows:

    sudo mkdir /mnt/my_new_disk (to create the directory where the disk will be mounted)
sudo mount /mnt/sdX1 /mnt/my_new_disk/ (to mount the disk in the directory)

  • It is done! You can access and use your new disk in /mnt/my_new_disk. You can type the command df to see your new disk is here.

  • Also if you want your new disk to be automatically mounted each time you reboot your machine, you have to add an entry in the file /etc/fstab. Be careful as this file is very sensitive to mistakes, your system can be hard to repair if you modify existing lines or introduce mistakes in it!

  • But here is the line to add in this file to have an automated mount of your disk:

    /dev/sdX1   /mnt/my_new_disk  ext4   defaults   0   3

  • Of course do not forget to replace the sdX1 by the appropriate name of your partition, and also for my_new_disk is you choose to give it another name. ext4 is the type of the file system used here.

  • On next reboot your disk will be automatically mounted.