Mozart 2 in VirtualBox?

[Peter Van Roy]

Dear all Mozart developers,

I will be teaching the MOOC "Paradigms of Computer Programming" again this fall (starting Sept. 22) to both UCL students and MOOC students.  I already taught this course in Spring 2014 and the students had a lot of problems correctly installing Mozart 2 on their machines.  They have so many different configurations that it is hard to make an easy installation.  This caused many students to drop out of the course.

For the fall, I would like to make Mozart 2 installation as easy as possible.  It seems that this could be done using VirtualBox: an open-source virtualizer for all common OSes.  It's possible to run almost any common OS on almost any (Intel) hardware with VirtualBox.  A virtual image that contains a Mozart 2 system can run almost anywhere.  The only problem is to install VirtualBox itself, and this seems to be easy.

Does any of you have experience with VirtualBox?  What do you think of this solution to make Mozart installation easy?

Peter

[Stewart Mackenzie]

As a temporary hack this should suffice.

Ideally there is a binary installation program ported to different platforms.

Virtualbox is very easy to use, there are plenty of online instructions, though it'd be good to show how to setup the VM with screenshots/videos etc before your course goes live.

Exciting Congrats on round 2!

S