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SeaDAS Virtual Appliance

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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.
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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):
Base files required to enable data processing
Linux (32bit) files required to enable data processing
Files for processing SeaWiFS data
Files for processing MODIS Aqua data
Files for processing MODIS Terra data
Files for processing MERIS data
Files for processing OCTS data
Files for processing CZCS data
Extra files required for using the SeaWiFS spectral optimization algorithm
MODIS Level-0 file and script for performing SeaDAS benchmarks
Digital elevation map for processing land, high altitude lakes, and browse/true color images

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'.
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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.

Curator: OceanColor Webmaster

Authorized by: gene carl feldman

seadas.gsfc.nasa.gov/seadas/seadasva.html

Privacy Policy and Important Notices

Updated: 08 June 2012

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