jttkim / ecslinux

Docker Image for UH ECS Practical Work

This work is in initial stages of development.

This repository is to put together a Docker image to enable students of the Engineering and Computer Science School of the University of Hertfordshire to do practical work while being physically away from the University.

This image so far provides:

• Editors: Emacs, Gedit, Vim
• OpenSSH, with a modified configuration to enable X11 forwarding
• Ocatve (Open Source Matlab-like system)
• R
• Python3 with IDLE

Usage Instructions

Install Docker on your computer. Docker Desktop is the current version and preferable in terms of ease of installation and continued support. However, older computers may not meet the requirements for Docker Desktop, for these, try using Docker Toolbox. Documentation of these options can be found here:

• Docker Desktop: https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop
• Docker Toolbox: https://docs.docker.com/toolbox/toolbox_install_windows/

Further prerequisites are:

• an ssh client (putty is a classical ssh client for Windows)
• an X11 server (Xming or Hummingbird are options for Windows)

With Docker and the prerequisites installed, run the commands

docker pull jttkim/ecspractical:latest
docker run -t -i jttkim/ecspractical:latest

You will start a container with the ecspractical image and get a root prompt.

TODO: more detailed step-by-step instructions

In the container, create a user and then ssh into the container using that user, with X11 forwarding. You can then launch octave or idle-python3.6.

Important: All files in the container are lost when you exit the root session started with the docker run command. Use a bind-mount for saving files permanently.

Planned / To Do:

• Netlab
• Rstudio
• Further editors. Atom and Sublime Text are not available from the standard Ubuntu repositories.

Tensorflow

The Tensorflow project provide a selection of Docker images that appear to be suitable for practical work here:

https://www.tensorflow.org/install/docker