CQPwebInABox

overview – setup – CQPwebOutsideTheABox – on VMware – learn more

Important note: CQPwebInABox is currently substantially behind on updates. A new image will come as soon as we can manage. For now, we do not recommend using it.

Overview

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CQPweb is not very easy to install. For that reason, we now supply CQPwebInABox: a Virtual Machine PC with CQPweb pre-installed.

It is designed especially for non-technical users. For advanced users, we have an alternative Virtual Machine: CQPwebOutsideTheBox, an enhanced version with lots of extras pre-installed that are very handy for computational corpus linguistics.

What's a Virtual Machine? Virtual Machine (VM) software does exactly what you'd think from the name: it is software that creates a virtual simulation of the hardware of a computer - chips, memory, hard drives, everything. If you have virtualisation software such as VMware or VirtualBox on your computer, then you can have multiple virtual machines running "inside" your real computer. Usually, what you see on the screen is simply a window displaying the contents of the VM's simulated monitor.

Because the VM runs on its own simulated hardware, it is totally separate from the real computer – it can even run a completely different operating system.

So what is CQPwebInABox then? It's a VM we created, with a lightweight version of Linux installed, plus CQPweb, and all the extra bits and pieces you need to make CQPweb work. We then exported this VM as a downloadable archive called an "image", so you can have an exact copy on your own computer, with everything already installed and set up.

If you install VirtualBox (the VM software we used to create CQPwebInABox), you can insert this image into VirtualBox, and then run the VM. You'll get a window containing a whole Linux machine – but it's set up so you can ignore the technical details of Linux, and just use CQPweb in the Firefox browser (which starts automatically for you).

Setting up CQPwebInABox (using VirtualBox)

How do I get CQPwebInABox? From this link. It's a BIG download (around 2 and 4 GB depending on the version); most of this is the VM's virtual hard drive (the hard drive of a VM is just a single really big file).

We produce a new VM image every now and again (basically, when the CQPweb code has changed enough to make it worth it!) If you're just starting out with CQPwebInABox, you should download the most recent. But once you have set it up, you don't really need to keep updating when new images are released. You can stick with a version as long as you like. VM image releases have codenames rather than numbers to avoid confusion with the CWB and CQPweb version numbers.

List of image releases:

CQPwebOutsideTheBox

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Coming soon!

How to install on VMware

For users who are new to VMs, we recommend VirtualBox over VMware for running CQPwebInABox on your own computer, for two reasons: (1) it's a less heavyweight program, so easier to use; (2) CQPwebInABox is created with VirtualBox to begin with.

However, if you're already a VMware user, you might quite reasonably want to stick with VMware for CQPwebInABox. This is possible, but requires you to make some tweaks: the format of the VM image is supposedly platform independent but in practice there are some incompatibilities.

First, download the image file.

Second, open the image file and extract the two files inside. Note that event though it has the extension .ova it is actually just a normal TAR file. So you can either change the extension to .tar and let your OS work out what to open it with, or else use commandline tar which does not care about the extension.

The two files you get are (1) the hard drive (the big one) and (2) the VM setup file (the small one). The latter has the extension .ovf but is really just an XML file.

Third, rename the hard drive file if its filename contains a date. Remove the date. The filename should be CQPwebInABox-disk1.vmdk.

Fourth, adjust the XML. Below is a commandline-script in PHP that automates the corrections if run from the same directory as the OVF file. You can alternatively make the replacements manually: 

<?php
$data = file_get_contents ('CQPwebInABox.ovf');
// correct system type
$data = str_replace('<vssd:VirtualSystemType>virtualbox-2.2</vssd:VirtualSystemType>', 
                    '<vssd:VirtualSystemType>vmx-07</vssd:VirtualSystemType>', $data);
// correct specification of SATA controller
// for the reason for what follows, please see: 
//     https://jekil.sexy/blog/this-ovf-package-requires-unsupported-hardware
$data = str_replace('sataController0', 'SCSIController', $data);
$data = str_replace('<rasd:Description>SATA Controller</rasd:Description>', 
                    '<rasd:Description>SCSI Controller</rasd:Description>', 
                    $data);
$data = preg_replace('|<rasd:ResourceSubType>AHCI</rasd:ResourceSubType>(\s*)' . 
                     '<rasd:ResourceType>20</rasd:ResourceType>|s',
                     '<rasd:ResourceSubType>lsilogic</rasd:ResourceSubType>$1' . 
                     '<rasd:ResourceType>6</rasd:ResourceType>', 
                     $data, 1);
file_put_contents('CQPwebInABox.ovf', $data);
echo "done\n";

You can now import the image into VMware (you don't have to roll the two files back together again, it will work quite happily if just pointed at the OVF file, as long as the two files are in the same location).

Learn more about CQPwebInABox

There are two video tutorials on the CWB YouTube channel.