Go to xvm.mit.edu and log in with your personal certificate. To create a new paraVM first enter a name , description, then click the Autoinstall radial button and select one of three operating systems from the drop-down menu. and finally, click "Create it!" --note: you may only use <quota> MiB of RAM. if you already have two VMs, you may not have enough left.

After creating the vm, you should wait about 5<?> minutes. This is an excellent time to get coffee, or to begin a short boffing match with one of your collegues

After 5<?> minutes you can access the machine's console from an athena machine or any machine that has kerberos tickets. assuming you have called your vm "myParaVM"

athena% ssh myParaVM@xvm-console.mit.edu

this will take a half-minute, but your terminal should then read

Type Ctrl-e, then c, then . to escape from the console

[Enter `^Ec?' for help]

hit enter. It will display information about the OS and vm name and a login promt. Type "root". If asked for a password, just hit enter. Normally, we don't want to login as root, so we need to add a user

root@myParaVM:~# adduser username

where username is preferrably your athena identity this will prompt you for a password and then for some personal information that does not matter for our purposes. In order to install software, we next need to add ourselves to the sudoers file.

root@myParaVM~# visudo

this opens /etc/sudoers using vi. if you are unfamiliar with original vi, you can type the following sequence of keys (where [enter] and [ctrl] stand for the enter and control keys and username is the username you just added:

20j$a[enter]username[space][space][space][space]ALL=(ALL) ALL[esc]:wq[enter]

<do I actually want it to be username ALL=(ALL) ALL?> lastly, we need to start the ssh daemon:

root@myParaVM~# /etc/sbin/sshd

now open up another local terminal and try to ssh into your VM:

athena% ssh username@myParaVM.xvm.mit.edu

and check that you can sudo:

username@myParaVM~$ sudo apt-get install emacs (or vim-gnome)