The SeaDAS Virtual Appliance - SeaDAS VA 6.4
The SeaDAS Virtual Appliance allows Microsoft Windows users to run SeaDAS
on their systems within a virtual Linux machine. The appliance includes a
fully functional version of SeaDAS within a streamlined Linux environment.
Installation is extremely simple and requires no knowledge of Linux.
For those who don't want to have to fuss with installing and administering Linux,
this is an easy solution. This virtual appliance was created using
VMware and simply
requires you to install the free VMware Player, download SeaDAS VA, and you're ready to go! SeaDAS
VA comes preinstalled on the
Xubuntu 10.04 Linux system, an efficient variant of Ubuntu. The XFCE Desktop Environment is also pre-installed.
Minimum recommended requirements:
1GB RAM
2GHz CPU
10GB of free hard disk space (you will need more if you plan to process data)
Windows XP SP3 or later
NOTE: Currently, the virtual appliance will not work on FAT32 formatted
hard disks (due to the FAT32 file size limit). Instead, the NTFS filesystem
should be used. To determine your filesystem type select My Computer in
the Start menu and under Hard Disk Drives, right click on any
hard disk drive and select Properties.
Installation Steps:
1) Please read the Security Considerations section
at the bottom of this page.
2) Download the 925Mb self extracting virtual machine to your Windows hard
disk:
ftp://samoa.gsfc.nasa.gov/seadas/seadas/seadasva64.exe
3) Download and install the Windows VMware Player application:
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
4) For the SeaDAS color system to work properly, the host Windows system
display must be set to millions of colors within the Windows Control Panel Display
section (any setting higher than 16-bit color is ok). If the Windows display is set
to 16-bit color, SeaDAS will still work but some of the colors may act strangely.
5) After the seadasva64.exe download completes, double-click it to extract
the seadasva6 folder containing these 2 files:
seadasvm.vmx: a small, editable configuration text file
seadasvm.vmdk: an 120GB virtual disk containing Xubuntu Linux,
XFCE Desktop and SeaDAS 6.4
6) At this point you may want to increase the RAM allocated to SeaDAS VA,
since the default setting is only 512MB. It will run with 256MB, but increasing
the amount of RAM will increase performance. RAM you assign to SeaDAS VA is not
available to the host OS, so make sure you leave at least 256MB for the host
Windows system (perhaps more if you are running Vista). To change the RAM
allocation:
open the seadasvm.vmx file with the Windows Notepad application
edit the memsize line (RAM MUST be a multiple of 4!)
save and close the file
7) Double-click the seadasvm.vmx file to open the virtual appliance and
start using SeaDAS! (If this doesn't work then start VMware Player manually and
use it to select the seadasvm.vmx file.) The VMware Player application will open,
Linux will boot, and you should eventually see a desktop with a SeaDAS session
and two terminal windows.
8) To avoid a huge SeaDAS VA file size, the version of SeaDAS installed
does not have any of the necessary auxiliary data files required for performing
data processing. So you may want to immediately download and install the data
files for any sensor whose data you plan on processing. These files can be directly
downloaded into SeaDAS VA or can be retrieved on the host Windows computer and
placed into the shared folder (see shared folder info below):
If any of these files are in the shared folder, simply type the following
command to install them:
cd $SEADAS
tar xvfz ~/shared/<file you downloaded>
OR if these files are within the SeaDAS VA, simply type the following
commands to install them:
mv <file you downloaded> $SEADAS
cd $SEADAS
tar xvfz <file you downloaded>
9) You may want to consider changing the default 1280x1024 display
resolution of the Linux system to match your Windows display resolution. Clicking
the top right Maximize button on the VMware Player window will activate
fullscreen mode. If your Windows resolution is set to less than 1280x1024, scroll
bars will be present to navigate the Linux desktop, or if your Windows resolution
is set to more than 1280x1024 a black border will surround the smaller Linux
desktop. If you decide to change the Linux screen resolution, open your Windows
Control Panel's Display section, determine your Windows display resolution, and then
execute the following command in a Linux terminal window:
sudo setres (the sudo
password is 'seadas')
Testing the SeaDAS Virtual Appliance:
1)One of the first things to test is to verify that your virtual appliance
is able to communicate with the network. One way to verify this is to launch
Firefox and attempt to load a web page.
2) If SeaDAS isn't open it can be started in two ways:
- click on the SeaDAS launcher on the desktop
- type "seadas" in a terminal window
3) If you have downloaded auxiliary data processing files (see step
8 above), you can test SeaDAS processing by downloading
seadas_benchmarks.tar.gz and running the SeaDAS benchmark script. See
the benchmarks page for
details. If after performing benchmarks your computer seems slow, you
may want to increase the RAM allocated to the appliance as outlined in the
Important Notes section below.
4) To test the shared folders feature, create within
Windows a C:\seadas_shared directory on your hard disk. Then in the VMware Player
window use the VMware Player->Shared Folders pull-down menu and select
'Always enabled', and make sure the Host Path is defined correctly (you can
customize this to be a different folder or drive as well). To see if the shared
directory is actually working, execute the following command in a Linux terminal:
touch ~/shared/testfile
ls -l ~/shared (if you see the
testfile listed then the shared directory is working)
Important Notes:
There are two options to terminate SeaDAS VA. The best option is usually to click
the top right 'X' button on the VMware Player window. Doing this will put SeaDAS
VA into 'sleep mode' and would be the equivalent of closing your laptop. This
method makes subsequent startups faster than booting the entire system. The
second method is to shutdown the Linux system by either selecting 'Logout' in the
start menu or executing 'shutdown -h now'.
If you plan to do MODIS L0->L1A or L1A->GEO processing it is advised to install
the auxiliary digital elevation maps by exploding
seadas_dem_modis.tar.gz
into the $SEADAS directory.
Beware that the virtual hard disk will keep growing as you add data until either
your Windows hard disk is full, or the virtual disk reaches 950GB.
You can process your data directly in the shared windows directory, but the
performance will decrease by approximately a factor of 2 due to overhead.
The default shared windows directory has been set to be C:\seadas_shared but
this can be changed to a different folder and/or drive using the VMware
Player->Shared Folders pull-down menu or by editing the seadasvm.vmx text file
using the Windows Notepad application.
We are looking into the possibility of making available an empty virtual disk so
users can do their processing on a separately mounted data disk instead of growing
the virtual appliance's virtual disk.
When in fullscreen mode, clicking the left push-pin button on the VMware Player
drop down menu will hide this menu until the mouse is moved over the thin menu strip
at the very top of the screen.
The amount of RAM allocated to SeaDAS VA can be changed in two ways. It can be
adjusted by editing the seadasvm.vmx file as outlined in Installation Step 6, or it
can be adjusted using the VMware Player's VMware Player->Troubleshoot->Change
Memory Allocation pull-down menu. For either of these options to take effect
the virtual machine must be rebooted by issuing the command 'sudo reboot' with the
sudo password being 'seadas'.
Security Considerations:
The base operating system (Xubuntu 10.04) and each application added
to it were updated with no known security vulnerabilities at the time of
creation. We make no guarantees that SeaDAS VA is completely secure. There
may be security issues that arise subsequent to this release, and you (the
user) are responsible for keeping any and all non-SeaDAS portions of the
appliance updated for security. Use at your own risk.
Since this appliance allows the user to potentially execute root commands (with
sudo), it is possible that a hostile user could gain Administrator access on the
host PC. It is your responsibility to ensure that your users do not use this
appliance for hostile purposes.
To see what packages are installed on this appliance, use the 'dpkg -l' command.
