Elmer Virtual Machine
=====================

This is the Linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 64bit virtual appliance (VA) for teaching
purposes provided by CSC. CSC provides this client "as is" - it is in the responsibility
of the user to deploy according to the license declarations within this VA.

The VA contains Elmer devel version 9.0 cf0840c10, Compiled: 2023-09-26
with ElmerGUI and Elmer/Ice functionality enabled as well as 
MUMPS, Hypre, (Par)MMG, Zoltan and NetCDF linked.

The virtual machine ensures that different operating systems can run exactly the same Elmer setup. 
At the same time the Elmer virtual machine provides perhaps the best possible user experience for 
starting users. Below some of the pros and cons of the virtual machine are listed.

Pros:
- Best possible Elmer experience out of the box
- Many auxiliary software are also provided (Paraview, Gmsh,...)
- Also MPI is fully supported 
- Updates in code can be taken into use by updating the code and recompiling (provided script)

Cons:
- Size of the download is quite large (~7.1 GB) which makes in impractical to download on slow connections
- It is more difficult to share data between software under the VM and those running under the main OS
- The virtual machine can never be quite as fast as the native OS and shares resources with its host.
- The 64-bit version may require some alterations in the BIOS setup, even though the host CPU/OS would
  be 64 bits.


To take the VM into use do as follows:

1) Install Oracle's VirtualBox on your computer (https://www.virtualbox.org/)
2) Download the virtual machine OVA-file from
    http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/physics/elmer/bin/VirtualMachines/Elmer-Ubuntu22LTS.ova
3) Open VirtualBox
4) From menu "File" select "Import Appliance" (Ctrl + I) and choose the downloaded file. 
5) IMPORTANT: tick "Reinitialize MAC address of all network cards" _before_ launching.
6) IMPORTANT: The default settings for the machine are to use a 2 computing cores and 8 GB RAM
   and 64 MB of video memory; these are moderate settings for modern laptops. If you need to 
   adapt these settings (e.g., less or even more RAM in your host), do this during importing or
   using the "Settings" menu _before_ launching
7) Launch the machine (Start, while highlighting the entry). You might be asked to agree to the
   license conditions during the process
8) After a rather lengthy boot time you should be logged in automatically. If asked for a password,
   use "elmerfem". Mind, that by default the Finnish keyboard is activated 
9) Elmer executables do not have icons so open a terminal and call them from command line: 
   ElmerSolver, ElmerGUI, ElmerGrid,...
10) To udate Elmer (needs network connection) launch ./buildelmer.sh from inside the directory
    /home/elmeruser/Source.


Note that the username for the VA is "elmeruser" and the password "elmerfem". For security reason we recommend
to change at least latter, if not creating a new user profile. By default, the firewall inside the guest is
dissabled (assuming that you use NAT networking and have a firewall at host side).

The VA assumes standard qwerty keywboard for the 23 ascii letters (Finnish, English, German, ...).
A notably exception here is French. So if you're typing a French keyboard the password is "el,erfe,". 
You can change your keyboard layout in the settings (left menu bar) of the GUI


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