4 Using the virtual machine

Starting the virtual machine is quite simple. Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the directory that you unzipped from myweb.zip. Then, double-click the batch file named myweb.bat. This should start the emulator and the virtual machine should show a boot screen. Enter live persistent in the boot screen prompt. This step causes the virtual server use persistent.img as a simulated hard disk for the file system. If you forget this step, then the virtual server uses a RAM disk for its file system, which means it cannot retain any content after the virtual machine exits!

Once the bootstrap process is done, you should see a command line prompt for a user called user. Note that the bootstrap process may take a while, and it may stay at the “squashfs: version...” screen for a long time, especially if you don’t install kqemu.

Once you get to the command prompt, you can use the virtual machine as any other Linux machine with a command line interface. However, you can also “connect” to the virtual server using SSH.

 4.1 Shutting down the virtual server
 4.2 SSH port
 4.3 HTTP port
 4.4 My mouse pointer is gone!