Dreamt of creating your Ensembl virtual Machine?

Now you can.
Over at their blog, they posted instructions on how to obtain a virtualbox image which you can use on any platform that virtualbox can be installed on (Win, Mac, Linux)

there are conversion tools to change virtualbox to vmware or even AMI
Should be seeing customised ensembl instances appearing more often


Will be giving this a whirl tomorrow! *rubs hands in glee*


http://asia.ensembl.org/info/data/virtual_machine.html

Ensembl Virtual Machine

Ensembl has available for download a virtual machine pre-packaged and pre-configured the latest ensembl-api. It is a quick and simple way to get started with Ensembl.

Overview of the process

The process is described in detail in the remainder of this document, with the main steps summarised as follows.

1. Obtain VirtualBox
2. Download and import the virtual machine
3. Create shared folders
4. Start and verify the Ensembl installation

UPDATE: the image uses the 64bit version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It runs pretty fast given one core and 4 Gb ram.

extremely roundabout way of writing to NTFS usb HDD on MacOS Lion

This is an extremely roundabout way of writing to NTFS usb HDD on MacOS Lion ...
Install Virtualbox and the extension pack (via extensions sub menu)
Install any Win OS as a virtual machine,
use USB filters to capture the USB HDD for the windows host

use local file sharing to transfer files from local disk to the USB HDD.

YMMV .... lemme know if you need details will post more later

Install VirtualBox on CentOS 5.4

Got the RPM for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) from the virtualbox.org site
After downloading, I got this error from the install

No precompiled module for this kernel found! ...
Compilation of kernel module FAILED! ...
Please consult
   /var/log/vbox-install.log
to find out why the kernel module does not compile.
Most probably the kernel sources are not found.
Install them and execute
   /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
as root.

Found this fix trying it now