We’re pleased to announce a new version of Virtual DICE for 2023–24.
Here’s how to download it.

What’s Virtual DICE?

The managed Linux machines here in the School of Informatics run an environment which we call DICE. It’s based on Ubuntu Linux. We use DICE on desktop computers and on servers, but there’s also a virtual version called Virtual DICE. It runs in VirtualBox, and it’s meant for personal machines. Each year we release a new version.

It has most of the software that’s needed for first and second year undergraduate exercises.

You can change it

Because Virtual DICE is a virtual machine, designed to be run on personal laptops and the like, it does not by default have a large amount of memory, file space or CPU cores, so it’s not useful for big, demanding computing applications. However, since it’s a virtual machine, you can change its hardware specification as you like. You’re only limited by your host machine.

You also get root access, so you can reconfigure Virtual DICE as you like.

To find out more read the Virtual DICE help pages.

Please upgrade from earlier versions

If you have an earlier version, please export whatever files you want to keep (for example, copy them to your AFS home directory) then delete it and install this new version instead.

Reporting problems

If you try it and you want to report a problem, we’d love to hear about it. Please use The Support Form, mentioning Virtual DICE in your message. Thanks!

Virtual DICE is now available / Computing Systems by is licensed under a