Online Python Tutor (OPT) enables first-year CS students to watch the nicely visualized execution of their Python programs step-by-step.
A fresh edX student very much liked OPT but had two problems with its online nature: sometimes the OPT Web site was not responding, sometimes she had no Internet connection. Fortunately, OPT is open sourced on GitHub, so I was able to set it up on her Windows notebook as follows:
Enabling VirtualBox host-only networking causes public Windows Firewall profile activation. A registry tweak followed by virtual network adapter disable/enable cycle is known to cure the problem, but only until the next VirtualBox upgrade, so some automation is desirable. I have taken a third-party PowerShell script fixing the same issue for VMware installs on Windows hosts and adapted it to VirtualBox.
It looked as if it could not propagate an environment variable pointing to the location of the file with my VMs settings to the VirtualBox command-line interface, so the latter kept looking for it in the system profile directory. Worked around by copying the file there; now have a small Ubuntu server running quietly in the background.
Presented in this post is a process optimized for the creation of multiple, nearly identical VirtualBox VM clones that may then run side-by-side on a single host.
However lean and streamlined have operating system installation procedures become in recent years, it is always desirable to reduce the amounts of time and user interaction required, especially when you need to conduct a series of (nearly) identical installations. Virtual machine cloning comes to the rescue. This post show how to install a baseline Ubuntu Server on a VirtualBox VM for subsequent cloning.