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 preferably 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. If you chose an Ubuntu installation, you can do this by adding your user to the admin group, as follows:
{{{
root@myParaVM~# adduser <username> admin
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If you chose Debian, add yourself to /etc/sudoers:
{{{
root@myParaVM~# visudo
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this opens /etc/sudoers using an available text editor (probably nano if you're in Debian).

If nano is used, it should be intuitive - add the following line at the end, save with Ctrl-O, and exit with Ctrl-X:
{{{
<username> ALL=(ALL) ALL
}}}

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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<what distribution is this valid in?>

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 -l
}}}