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>.
We recommend saving a temporary or working copy of your data on the VM if carrying out compute heavy work on your files which are stored in the workspace files: users may notice a lag in reading or writing to the workspace files due to them not being local to the VM. Generally, Aridhia are more easily able to provide very large amounts of storage on the workspace files compared to a VM but users should consider the most efficient way to store their data vs their accessibility and usability needs.