Sometimes you need to run software which needs a lot of oomph behind it, and which can take days to run. It’s a bit impractical to run that sort of thing on a normal desktop – which is why Informatics has compute servers. Until recently there was one for staff (called staff.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk) and one for […]

We’ve added a second student compute server, and it’s called student2.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk. Students can login to it like this: ssh student2.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk We’ve done this because in recent days the student compute server (student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk) has been unresponsive at times, because it’s been used so enthusiastically. There’s a range of things we could do to help, and we’re […]

The 2021-22 version of Virtual DICE is now available. Virtual DICE is like the School of Informatics’ DICE Linux environment, except that you can run it on your own computer in a virtual machine. If your computer can run VirtualBox, and has an Intel architecture, then Virtual DICE should run on it. We’ve just released […]

Are you having problems logging in? Use your username When you login to a DICE Linux computer, use your DICE username. That username is the same as your University Username (“UUN” for short). For students it’s the letter “s” followed by your matriculation number. For example, if your username is s2345678 then you type this […]

Updated (26/08/21): this work is complete. This is about downtime for the remote desktop service, and how you can carry on using the service while your usual server is not available. What’s remote.inf.ed.ac.uk? The remote desktop service gives you a remote DICE graphical session when you connect to username.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk, where username stands for your own […]

To use our remote desktop service, or any RDP connection to a computer at Edinburgh University, you must now (edit: from 07:00 on Wednesday 28 April) use a University VPN. If you don’t, you won’t get a connection. If you already use the University VPN or the Informatics OpenVPN, carry on – RDP should work […]

We’re changing the *.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk Remote Desktop service to remove some of the machines. However, everybody will still be able to use the service as before. Back in the spring, we made ten machines available for remote desktop sessions under the name UUN.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk where UUN is your University username. (For instance, my username is cc so […]

We’ve updated Virtual DICE! Both “little” and “large” VMs have been updated. There are two changes compared to last month’s release: VirtualBox Guest Additions has been updated to a much newer version, so the Virtual DICE VM should now be better integrated with the rest of your computer environment. For example, the focus will be […]

We advise waiting a while before updating your Mac to the new macOS version, Catalina, for two reasons: firstly it has bugs, which Apple is steadily fixing; secondly it introduces a security system which is causing problems for software which hasn’t been adapted to deal with it. At the time of writing, VirtualBox is an […]

A new version of Virtual DICE is out – in fact, two new versions! They have the software for the 2019-20 session. Virtual DICE is the lightweight DICE-like virtual machine which you can install and run on your own computer. Here’s how to get it. We release a new version of Virtual DICE twice a […]