Using your Virtual Machine

Once your Virtual Machine is provisioned, you can use it much like a normal desktop.

Maximising the screen

You might find it useful to maximise the amount of screen space that your Virtual Machine uses. This can be done using    button which you will find at the top right of your Virtual Machine screen.

If you are focusing on your Virtual Machine, then you may also wish to use the F11 button in your browser to maximise screen space further. In Chrome, you can exit the full screen by pressing F11 again.

If your window is showing whitespace around the VM, try resizing your browser and maximizing again.

Pasting from your local clipboard

It may be that you wish to copy something from your local machine and copy it into your Virtual Machine. Simply copy as normal and then use    button to load it into your Virtual Machine's clipboard. Again, you can find this at the top right of your VM window.

Accessing the web

For security reasons, the locations that your Virtual Machine can access outside of the workspace context are highly controlled. As standard, you have access to some statistical software and package management sites. The full allowed domains list can be found here. Your organisation may have also requested that we allow access to other sites such as their homepage or help articles. If you feel that you need more sites added to the allowed domains list, please contact your Workspace Administrator.

Installing software

Some software such as RStudio or Jupyter Notebook can be installed directly in the VM using the web or command line. You can also install software by uploading an executable file (.exe) to your workspace files (as described here) and then running the file within the desktop. You may find that copying the .exe file to your local machine will make the installation faster.

Accessing your workspace files

Within the Virtual Machine, you should have access to your workspaces files.

In a Windows machine, these can be found in This PC > files.

In a Linux machine, the files can be found at home/desktop<desktop number>/files</desktop>.

Updated on August 31, 2023

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