Building your own JASMIN Virtual Machine
I make a good deal of use of the JASMIN science virtual machines, but sometimes I want to just do something locally for testing. Fortunately you can build your own virtual machine using the “ JASMIN Analysis Platform” (JAP) to get the same base files.
Here’s my experience building a JAP instance in a VMware Fusion virtual machine (I have a Macbook, but I have thus far done all the heavy lifting inside a linux mint virtual machine … but the JAP needs a centos or redhat base machine, hence this).
Step One: Base Virtual Machine
We want a base linux virtual machine on which we build the JAP.
- Start by downloading a suitable base linux installation (Centos or RedHat). Here is one I got some time ago: CentOS-6.5-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso
- From VMware fusion choose the File>New Option and double click on the “Install from Disc or Image” option and find your .iso from the previous step.
- Inside the linux easy install configure your startup account
- You might want to configure the settings. I chose to give mine 2 cores and 4 GB of memory and access to some shared folders with the host.
- Start your virtual Machine.
- (Ignore the message about unsupported hardware by clicking OK)
- Wait … do something else …
- Login.
- (This is a good place to take a snapshot of the bare machine if you have the available disk space. Snapshots take up as much disk as you asked for memory.)
Step Two: Install the JAP
Following instructions from here. There are effectively three steps plus two wrinkles. The three steps are: get the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux into your config path; get the CEDA JAP linux into your config path; and build. Then the wrinkles: the build currently fails! However, the fixes to make it build are pretty trivial.
- Open up a terminal window and su to root.
- Follow the three steps on the installation page, then you’ll see something like this:
--> Finished Dependency Resolution Error: Package: gdal-ruby-1.9.2-1.ceda.el6.x86_64 (ceda) Requires: libarmadillo.so.3()(64bit) ... Error: Package: grib_api-1.12.1-1.el6.x86_64 (epel) Requires: libnetcdf.so.6()(64bit) ... Not found You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
But never fear, two easy fixes are documented here. You need to
- Force the install to use the CEDA grib_api, not the EPEL version, You do that by putting
exclude=grib_api*
at the end of the first (EPEL) section in the /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo file, and
- Add the missing (older version of the) armadillo library by downloading the binary rpm on the ticket and installing it locally, then you can redo the final step:
- yum install jasmin-sci-vm
And stand back and wait. You’ll soon have a jasmin-sci-vm.