Open source writing using Git

Of late I have noticed a trend – writers, especially technical writers, are embracing the software development process and incorporating it into their writing process. There’s a great podcast about this on Herding Code where some technical writers talk about this trend.

Writers are embracing the agile philosophy of software development, one of the core tenets of this is to publish often and get feedback so you can improve/adjust. Authors are posting the content for their book projects online to get feedback – to the extent that publishers like Manning and O’Reilly offer programs that let people access to the book content as soon as the author creates it, for a discounted amount. The pioneers of this practice were the Pragmatic Programmers who offer “beta” versions of their books to customers at discounted prices. The idea behind this of course is that it lets authors get valuable feedback as to what is important, what to focus on. It also provides, authors with an incentive to keep from procrastinating about their writing.

Another major aspect of this trend is the embrace of source control in the writing process. I think this is a great development, and it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.  The book writing process, like software development, is subject to a lot of chopping and changing as the book evolves. Also writing collaboratively on something is I imagine similar to writing code in a team and probably have the same issues –  one needs ways for multiple people to be able to work on the same document without worrying if they are overwriting someone else’s hard work. Finally, a version control provides you with a fine-grained backup that allows you to rewind and replay the evolution of the book, which should be invaluable during the editing process. If there is a conflict somewhere, version control also offers tools to detect and fix it in a safe manner.

Some authors have posted their content on Github, which I think is an awesome idea.    Leveraging, the capabilities of a version control, especially a powerful and distributed one like Git and Github, is well suited for writing projects. Authors can leverage the tools  and capabilities of Github  –

• On Github, feedback can easily be provided in the form of  commit notes, line notes, issues – heck you can even fork the project make the corrections and submit a pull request back to the author.
• You can use Git as a fine grained distributed backup for your writing project that allows you to rollback specific portions of you project independently.
• You can use the social features of Github to collaborate on the project and even drum up interest by distributing the link online.
• You can maintain your code samples and other resources separately from your content and correct and upgrade them as needed. This can be very useful if the book is about specific technical frameworks that get upgraded after the book is completed and published.
• Github even has a basic editor so you can work on your project online

While browsing through Github for examples of books that use Github as a version control system for writers – I came across this tool which is  in my mind a good first step, but I think there is a lot more that we can do to improve this experience. There are a whole lot of tools being built around this concept which is quite encouraging.

Writing and programming, have a lot in common. Both involve text, both are creative activities and both are ways to express ideas (one to a machine and the other to an audience) . There is scope for a lot of cross pollination of ideas between these fields. I think, currently the main challenge is a lack of knowledge and a fear of the technical nature of a tool like Git.

Related links

• Git Scribe
• On writing technical books
• Arcturo ebooks on Github
• Mordern Perl book on Github
• Backbone fundamentals on Github
• Node Beginner on Github

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A Ruby on Rails glossary.

So it’s been about a year since I started working on the Ruby language in the context of the Rails framework. It’s been awesome,  the combination of Ruby’s developer friendly language style and the incredible productivity of the Rails framework makes this a killer framework for web applications. Building the basic code is simply a matter of typing in some commands that generate all the scaffolding of code needed for a basic website. The rest is usually a matter of tweaking and adding to the generated scaffold.

Image by dullhunk via Flickr

Like every web technology the Ruby on Rails framework has its own set of idioms, that one needs to get familiar with and since I am new to Ruby, for me this includes some Ruby idioms as well. I saw a post today that lists a glossary of Rails terms and I thought I’d do my own. So here goes –

1. Application Servers – Thin, Mongrel, Passenger, Unicorn, Pow – These are application servers that run the Ruby web application and respond to the requests. They are generally integrated with a web-server like Apache or Nginx, though Mongrel is technically capable of running on its own as a web-server (though since it is not multi-threaded this configuration is not useful for anything except for very light loads or on a development machine).
2. Active Record – Active record is the ORM tool used in the Rails framework to abstract the database handling. It is an implementation of the active record architectural pattern described by Martin Fowler thus – “An object that wraps a row in a database table or view, encapsulates the database access, and adds domain logic on that data.” The Active Record code is available as a separate gem that is downloaded as a dependency to Rails.
3. Active Resource – A simple way to think of active resource is that it’s like active record but for REST based web-services. Active record provides a wrapper around REST actions providing a transparent proxy between a business entity and REST based web-services.
4. Active Support – This is a set of utility classes and standard library extensions that are useful in Rails application development. It includes classes for dealing with caching, dates, time zones, text, etc. Like active record and active resource, active support is available as a separate gem that is installed as a dependency of the Rails gem.
5. Bundler – Bundler manages the gem dependencies of a ruby application in a repeatable way across multiple machines. It automatically looks for and installs / updates all the gems needed by the application when it is deployed on a machine. It can do this is a repeatable way across multiple machines and deployments.
6. Capistrano – Capistrano is a tool for executing command on groups of servers over SSH. It is used mainly in deploying web applications and is capable recognizing different types of server environment (like staging and production, etc).
7. Capybara – This is an advanced version of the Webrat tool. It lets you do acceptance testing of applications using various drivers (Selenium and Rack are built-in) by simulating a real user hitting your web application.
8. CoffeeScript – Coffee-script is a little language that compiles into java-script. It has rapidly become very popular and has been included in Rails 3.1 as the default method of writing JavaScript code in a Rails application. I am personally a bit on the fence here but I like its terse syntax.
9. Cucumber – Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable DSL and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid – all rolled into one format. Cucumber along with RSpec are main tools used for the BDD methodology favored in many Rails projects.
10. DSL(Domain Specific Language) – A domain-specific language is a language dedicated to a particular domain or the representation of a particular problem or solution. DSL’s are more common than you think, some good examples in the Ruby being – Cucumber, Rake, Haml etc.
11. ERB (Embedded Ruby) – ERB is a simple and powerful templating system for Ruby. It is part of the Ruby core and it allows one to place ruby within other files (any text document).
12. FactoryGirl – This is a gem that can be used for creating object factories in an automated fashion. This is useful in testing or even for populating an application when deployed
13. Gem – At its most basic form, a Ruby gem is a package. It has the necessary files and information for being installed on the system. There is an online repository for Ruby gems at http://rubygems.org/ For me this is the biggest find and literally the “hidden gem” of my Ruby learning experience has been – Ruby Gems.  It’s like having an app-store for your development needs, where most of the best gems are freely available to you!  The number of awesome, useful gems actually available to ruby developers means that we have a huge advantage over other frameworks. A testament to the power of Ruby gems has been that Microsoft has started its own package management library – Nuget which, seems to be simply a straight lift of the Ruby Gems concept, except of course they have incorporated it into the Visual Studio as an extension. Nuget was released by the same team that created the Microsoft version of Rails – ASP.Net MVC so you can see the Rails influence…
14. Gherkin – Gherkin is a DSL  that emerged from the Cucumber project. It was designed to succinctly describe behavior in a form that can be acted upon by a tool like Cucumber. It is described as business readable DSL and can be used in any project that has need of such a tool. The lexer and parser for the language has been create and the library is available in several frameworks including Ruby, JVM, Javascript (Node.js) and as a .NET dll.
15. Git – Git is a free and open source, distributed version control system. It was written by Linus Torvalds to replace the old source control system for Linux and has become one of the tools of choice for a lot of Ruby projects. Git is typically used along with Github which is an online source control repository that leverages Git.
16. Haml – Haml is an HTML abstraction language. Haml functions as a replacement for inline page templating systems such as PHP, ASP, and ERB, the templating language used in most Ruby on Rails applications.
17. Heroku – Heroku is a cloud based platform as a service (PaaS) which was one of the first to have Ruby and Rails support. One could build a Rails application and directly deploy it on Heroku without having to set up a web-server. The platform has evolved to support multiple languages including Java, Scala, Node.js, Clojure and Python.
18. jQuery – jQuery has become the JavaScript framework of choice for web developers everywhere. It is a fast, framework that leverages CSS style selectors to allow developers to traverse, animate and handle events in the HTML DOM while abstracting browser specific quirks as far as possible. It has become so popular that it displaces Prototype as the default JavaScript framework used in Rails 3 applications.
19. Memcached – A distributed open source caching system, memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. It is a generic store and can be used in any situation where caching is needed and is available in multiple languages and technologies. It is used in a lot of Rails applications even though today, other object stores like Redis are getting popular.
20. Merb – Like Ruby on Rails, Merb is an MVC framework. But, it a lighter and more barebones version. I haven’t used Merb – I’d love it if someone could give a more apt description of what Merb is and how it compares to Rails and Sinatra.
21. Open classes / Monkey Patching – Open classes is a feature of the Ruby language where you can simply open and add methods to existing classes. Active support library uses this feature to add a lot of its helper functions on the Ruby core classes like string. A popular name for this particular practice is “Monkey Patching”.
22. Paperclip – Its a complete (and easy) file attachment library for active record. It provides validation features based on the properties of the file like size, type, etc. The files themselves are saved in the filesystem. It has some basic image manipulation features as well, like creating thumbnails etc. There is a dependency on the ImageMagick library (an awesome image manipulation library) in order to use Paperclip.
23. Prototype – Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. It was originally the default JavaScript framework bundled with Rails.
24. Rack –  Rack is a gem that provides a simple interface between a web-server and the Ruby web framework. Rack is used in various Ruby web frameworks, like Rails, Sinatra and Merb.
25. Rake – Rake is the ruby version of make but much more developer friendly. It provides capabilities that are similar to make but it uses the Ruby syntax instead of XML files or makefile syntax to define tasks.
26. REST(Representational State Transfer) – REST is a set of principles that define how Web standards, such as HTTP and URIs, are supposed to be used. Well, actually REST as a concept is more abstract than that – its architectural style that can be applied to distributed systems. REST in the context of Rails, mainly is used to refer to the way Rails exploits REST concepts in the way that Rails web applications are structured.
27. RJS(Ruby JavaScript) – It is a ruby helper used to generate JavaScript that are used to decorate HTML pages. It is used mainly in AJAX calls, and in situations where you wanted to conditionally emit JavaScript. The general opinion though was that it sucked and was avoided in favor of the unobtrusive style of jQuery.
28. Routing – Routing is the aspect of the Rails web application that deals with the translation of a URL request to a specific action in the application. In Rails, it is the job of the router to recognize URLs and dispatch them to a controller’s action. It can also generate paths and URLs, avoiding the need for hardcoded strings in your views.
29. RSpec – RSpec is a Behaviour-Driven Development tool for Ruby programmers. RSpec helps you do the TDD part of that equation, focusing on the documentation and design aspects of TDD. Like Cucumber RSpec uses a DSL to simplify design and implementation tests.
30. Ruby Debug – Just like it says on the tin – it is a debugger for ruby applications. Like the other tools it is gem that can be installed and can run your ruby application in debug mode.
31. RVM(Ruby Version Manager) – This is an awesome tool from Wayne Seguin that is used to install, manage and work with multiple versions of the Ruby programming language on your machine. It even allows you to segregate your gems so you could work with multiple versions of the same gem for different applications.
32. SASS & SCSS – These are CSS abstraction languages (I believe SCSS is a reference to the version that supports CSS3). They are compiled down to CSS. They allow you use variables, modules and include other files. I am not very familiar with them and would welcome more information from readers.
33. Sinatra – From the website – “Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.” Like Merb, Sinatra is a minimalist web framework. Again, like Merb, I haven’t used Sinatra at all and would welcome some comments to flesh out this entry.
34. Test::Unit – This is the default testing library available with Ruby. It is from the xUnit family of testing frameworks and is a part of the core Ruby libraries. It is mostly not used in favor of more powerful BDD style tools like RSpec.
35. UJS(Unobtrusive Javascript)– “Unobtrusive JavaScript” is a general approach to the use of JavaScript in web pages. The general principles of this approach includes –
    1. Separation of behavior from the markup – The HTML in a document is meant to describe the structure of the document and should not contain programmatic elements in it. This is similar to the principle of separation of the structure from the presentation of the document when talking about the separation of CSS and HTML.
    2. Should not pollute the global namespace – UJS code should add as little as possible to the global object or global namespace of the environment in which it runs.
    3. Degrade gracefully – If the browser rendering the document does not have the capability needed the code should be able to degrade gracefully without breaking the rest of the application.
36. Vim – IMO Vim, the text editor that just celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2011 has experienced a resurgence of sorts with the rise of Ruby and Rails. In fact there is a large number of Vim plugins that have been created to make developers even more productive and happy on this text editor. Indeed after Textmate (the other favored tool for Rails developers) I think Vim has the biggest following among Rails developers and the fact that its available even on Linux and Windows only makes it cooler…
37. Web Servers – Apache, nginx, Lighthttpd , Thin – In the Rails world web servers options include Apache, nginx and lighty(lighthttpd) of which Apache is by far the most popular. I have included Thin in this list as well since it includes both a web-server and an application server. With advent of PaaS providers like Heroku, this particular aspect of web application development is becoming abstracted out, just as the database is getting abstracted on the other end.
38. Webrat – This is a headless browser that is used in web application testing. It lets you run in browser test without the associated overhead of actually instantiating a browser. This does not execute any JavaScript but is great for doing tests of simple websites without much JS interactions.
39. Will_Paginate – This is the most popular pagination library out there for Ruby on Rails. It alos supports other Ruby web frameworks like Sinatra and Merb. This gem has a wide variety of formatting options and can accept an active record object or even a simple array. It is quite configurable and can be easily extended to do AJAX pagination as well.

So, that’s all the terms that I can think of so far, I’ll try to add to this as and when I come across more terms. Nowadays, web development is more than a single framework, even one like Rails.  I have found the Rails community is more open and embracing of different ideas and frameworks – even to the extent of moving away from Rails and using lightweight frameworks like Sinatra. IMO that makes this glossary all the more relevant and fun.

As I have mentioned in the article I don’t profess to be an expert about or have even used all the tools and technologies listed above. I would love to get your comments and suggestions on what could be added.

And last but not the least – I wish you all an awesome 2012 – may all your efforts bear fruit this year.

Update (Jan 12 – 2012) : Since there has been some interest in this post, I have added a few more entries and provide more information where I can – stay tuned :-)

Thoughts on Ruby – I think it’s great…

So it’s the middle of the year and like last year I am in the middle of a new language. This time however there are some differences from last year.

The biggest one is that this year I am actually working on the language – Ruby – while I am learning it and I think this makes a big difference. Though I know that one can learn a language using sample exercises and Code Katas – somehow I think the experience of working with a language everyday – gives one a real appreciation of what it is like to live with a language. When you are learning a language by choice – in your own time – you get to choose the problems and the Katas. When you have to work with the language and you use it daily on problems thrust upon you by seemingly unreasonable and sometime crazy requirements – you get a better understanding of the warts and wrinkles of the language along with the pretty bits.

I actually had a cursory look at Ruby sometime back, I had downloaded the language and looked at a tutorial on the web. I solved a couple of basic Project Euler questions with it. I remember thinking at the time – “Hmmmm, not really all that different from Python…” and deciding that learning it was not going to get me much. I was looking to exploring languages like F# and Erlang at the time, since they were based on different ways of solving programming problems.

So, when I started on this Ruby project this year, I came with certain preconceptions – but then something happened that changed how I approached Ruby completely. I read the online book – Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and I realized that the way I had coded Ruby thus far was not the way Ruby was intended to be coded. Before I go a little further I think I will digress a little give my impression of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby…

This is not the first time I had heard of Why and his book.

Image via Wikipedia

Indeed one would be hard pressed indeed to spend any time in the Ruby community and not have heard about Why the lucky stiff, his book and his sudden disappearance from the internet (another digression – I really am amazed at the fact this person was able to keep his virtual life so compartmentalized from his non-virtual one that he was able to disappear so completely!). My first impression after reading the first few pages was – Wow!! This guy must have a good collection of hallucinogens and Pink Floyd albums – to create those weird cartoons…

Image via Wikipedia

But, happily I persevered and was rewarded with a real appreciation of the beauty of Ruby. This book is not only a guide to the Ruby language – it is a guide to the Ruby philosophy – The Ruby Way. I would definitely recommend this book to all developers that are looking to learn Ruby, especially if you are coming from a background of working on the “big iron” languages like C# – this book will provide that mental shift in the way you code, that will let you really appreciate Ruby.

Well, now that the digression is out of the way, lets come back to the question coding style in Ruby. Rubyists tend to favor terse code that conveys its intent clearly and concisely. The Ruby culture uses idiomatic syntax and encourage succinctness in code. I really came to appreciate this when I saw the Ruby approach to a basic programming structure – the loop.

The canonical implementation of a for loop is in the form –

for <counter> <condition>
<begin block>
	<do something>
<end block>

In C it is –

for(i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{

}

In VB it is –

for i = 0 to 10

next

or in the case of iterating through an array

for each <item> in <group>
  <do something>
next

In Ruby the for loop can be expressed in a variety of ways –
The vanilla for loop is available –

for i in 0..10

end 

for  in 

end

But there is also –

5.times { <do something> }

1.upto(10) (<do something)

<group>.each {<do something>}

<group>.map
  <do something>
end .
.
.

Now it can be argued that functions like map are available in other mainstream programming languages as well – but the point I’m trying to make is – in the Ruby way of programming they become the usual way of doing things.

Ruby is a language designed for developers – but in order to fully appreciate and utilize this one must write (and read) Ruby the way Ruby is meant to be written. Once you embrace “The Ruby Way” you will see in Ruby a language that stays out of the way of your thinking. Instead of grappling with or worrying about syntax, you spend more of you time working on your solution. You can see the syntax is very easy to read. In fact the expressiveness of Ruby makes it easy to get to the intent of the code without getting hung up on the syntax. Reading code after you left it for awhile becomes a snap and you find yourself getting back to where you left of more easily.

I had written a post earlier regarding “the coding zone” – Ruby gets me into the coding zone more easily and lets me sustain it for longer than with any other language I know. It is liberating to be able to conceive of and code entire features in the time it took me to look up the idiosyncrasies of the syntax and battle the compiler of other languages. I find coding in Ruby to be a pleasant experience, not the least because of the incredible community around it. The Ruby community in a very real sense is one of the strengths of the language that put it ahead of Python in my book.

So (as you can probably tell from this long post) – I am really enjoying my latest foray into Ruby. That’s not to say Ruby is perfect – even if you ignore its real performance disadvantage – Ruby has some things that can definitely be improved – but with its great community I think it has a real chance of moving forward and fixing these things.

A podcast review – Software Engineering Radio

I am a fan of podcasting.. video blogging and screen casts are fine, but in terms of convenience and bang for the megabyte – nothing beats a podcast :-). I have been listening to podcasts for a few years now. I am usually listening when walking home from work or doing some chores. In fact I wrote an earlier postabout them along with some of my favorites (at the time).Of late I have listened a lot to a podcast called Software Engineering Radio. Actually, I have been listening to this one for a long time now and it has grown from strength to strength. It was started by a German software consultant – Markus Voelter and is based in Europe (the details are here). There is now a team of people both creating episodes as well as supporting the website. A new episode is published every 10 days and the feed for it is available at the website.

The podcast is about the software engineering and is for professional developers (it says so in the title :-)).  IMHO it is the best podcast for professional developers I have come across.  Markus and his team of volunteers do a great job – the interviews are professionally done and the audio quality is great. The post production is also very well done – in fact they have put up videos about their recording and post-production process. All the recording are released as part of Creative Commons 2.5 license and I think the majority of the episodes are gems worth downloading and keeping.

The coolest thing about Software Engineering Radio and what ultimately makes it such a great resource are the subjects and the people they interview.

The subjects are for the most part about software engineering practice – but they are things that are really useful to ones growth as a software professional. Episodes range from discussions about software development methodology to software languages and tools to computer science research.  In fact there was recently a very interesting episode on the – Difference between Software Engineering and Computer Science.

The people interviewed range from professional software developers and consultants to researchers and academics. Some are giants in their field and others I haven’t heard of (admittedly thats a large percentage of them – maybe because I hadn’t heard of their field in the first place ;-)).

Another thing I would like to mention is the format of the episodes. They are interviews and the team at SE Radio
go to great lengths to prepare and ask just the right questions to
illuminate the topic at completely and extract pearls of wisdom from
the people they interview. I think this format is better than a speech or a presentation because of the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewed.

There is sometimes a problem with the English accent – most of the team are from mainland Europe and have European accents, but it is never so bad that one cannot understand what is being said. In fact one of the things I like about the show are the various accents of people from different parts of Europe, UK and America. It makes the show more interesting to me as I try to guess at the nationalities of the interviewer and interviewed from their accents ;-)

Software Engineering, podcast, review

A Linux for every trade…

While puttering around the internet the other day I came upon this software AptonCD and while going through it – a set of light bulbs went off in my head and I actually had an idea ! I was so excited by this that I thought I’d blog about it :-)

I participate in the Free Software Users Group, Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) and one if it’s main activities is making Linux available to the general populace. As part of this activity a local company Zyxware Technologies (these really cool guys BTW) put together vending machine (Freedom Toaster) which burns various Linux distributions on CD/DVD media. This proved to be a very successful project (broadband is still limited and expensive in India so downloading distributions is quite difficult).

One of my challenges as a developer has been around setting up the development environment. All developers have a certain toolkit that they are comfortable with. Depending on their level of  sophistication this can be as simple as a text editor to a full blown IDE…  The challenge for me was finding and setting up equivalent tools in the Linux platform to the ones I used in Windows.

It occurred to me  that the challenge I detailed above would be a common one for anyone that is using a set of software tools for their trade.  It would also be useful to people in other professions (other than programming software) that are switching to Linux from another OS platform like Windows to get a set of equivalent tools in Linux for the ones they use in Windows. In fact there are lists out there that detail Linux equivalents to Windows tools.

So here is my idea – We could leverage AptonCD to create meta-packages that people could simply install over the base Linux distribution. These packages would be prepared separately from the base Debian install (Apt is the Debian package manager) and applied after the distribution is installed.

This is not a new idea – in fact here in Kerala we already have a custom Debian distribution that is targeted for schools – IT@School .  The twist here is that while the IT@School is a custom Debian distribution what I have in mind is more in terms of meta-packages that can be installed over a base Debian distribution like Ubuntu. We can leverage the Freedom Toaster to distribute these packages for people. The packages would be created by professionals in a trade  for other professionals who want to use Linux but are not sure how to get all the tools of their trade on it. These people can simply install the OS distribution and install the meta-package for their trade and voila – they can get to work :-)

Of course there are still challenges – Linux often has several tools for a particular task and there may be version conflicts as well. I have also not accounted for the learning curve in getting used to these tools. Nonetheless, I think this would at least give a head-start to professionals wanting to use Linux as a platform for their trade and drive adoption of Linux.

The ultimate aim IMHO is not to make everyone in the world a super-duper Linux hacker but to make people productive in Linux :-)

Setting up Ubuntu 8.04 Server on VirtualBox

Yesterday, I was trying to install Ubuntu 8.04 server on my desktop using VirtualBox to set up a virtual LAMP server to play with.

VirtualBox is a virtualizer software like VM-Ware or Virtual PC. It is supported by Sun and is the the only one which is open source. It’s a pretty slick piece of software and  comes with a set of pre built host environments on which you can install various operating systems.  It has a nice intuitive user interface and pretty full featured.

So, I started off on my installation – picked Ubuntu host environment and assigned 512 MB of RAM and 10GB for the hard drive. Then I pointed it to the Ubuntu 8.04 server install ISO and off I went through the install. The install itself went off without any problems – I chose the LAMP server setup and everything went smoothly. The problem was after the install when I tried to boot up the server – I got the following error –

The kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU

0:6

Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU

So I Googled around for the error and got some blog posts (oh good so I am not crazy :-)) that I went through and I thought I’d summarize it here for reference. So here goes –
The Ubuntu 8.04 Server installation comes with a kernel that assumes that Physical Address Extension (PAE) is enabled in the processor. This is a feature in x86 and x86-64 bit processors that allow them to address more that 4GB of physical address space (which makes sense – this is a server install after all…). This feature is not turned on by default in the VirtualBox software’s virtual processor.  The simple solution is to enable this feature in the VirtualBox software – one does that as follows –

1. Shutdown the Virtual Machine (VM) instance.
2. Open the settings on the VM through the VM VirtualBox manager
3. Go to  -> General -> Advanced -> check Enable PAE/NX
4. Start your VM
5. Check to ensure that the Virtual Machine boots properly

That’s it – many thanks to the following bloggers and their blog entries :-)

1. Hype-Free
2. Blog Foo