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
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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
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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
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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$a[enter]username[space][space][space][space]ALL=(ALL) ALL[esc]:wq[enter]
}}}
<do I actually want it to be username ALL=(ALL) ALL?>
lastly, we need to start the ssh daemon:
{{{
root@myParaVM~# /etc/sbin/sshd
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now open up another local terminal and try to ssh into your VM:
{{{
athena% ssh username@myParaVM.xvm.mit.edu
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and check that you can sudo:
{{{
username@myParaVM~$ sudo apt-get install emacs (or vim-gnome)
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