Chisel Environment

We have put together a known-good environment inside a VM. There's a script that installs everything you need for the rest of the learning journey into the VM, and then all the other steps of the journey assume that environment. You can run the script in any flavor of Linux, but there may be incompatibilities that cause issues later in the Journey. If you feel up for installing the VM and setting up the environment then you know there won't be any tool related issues down the road.

Even though it is probably not impossible to see Chisel firing up and running in a Windows environment, the most common practice is to use a flavor of GNU/Linux, as demonstrated by the Chisel creators in this document.

Set up the virtual machine approach in the following way:

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is available for both Windows and a number of flavors of GNU/Linux. Kindly proceed to download the installation appropriate to your everyday environment. Please take care to install Guest Additions, which allow you to copy-paste and to share a folder on your host OS with the VM, as well as get internet access from inside the VM. Finally, when creating a virtual machine, please follow the advice given here concerning the chipset, acceleration and other virtual hardware. For the virtual RAM and hard drive, please select 4 GB if available (2 GB should also do in most cases) and at least 30 GB of disk, respectively.

Mint 18

The OS of choice here is an Ubuntu derivate, Mint 18, which was chosen for its simplicity. The standard Journey flow assumes the 64 bit version. If problems arise during the OS installation to the created virtual machine, check your host BIOS settings - you might have to enable virtualization there. One example, just to give the basic idea, is given here.

See the ((detailed steps of setting up environment)) page for more detail.

One of the many ways to perform these steps is given in this video.

Next Steps

Once the OS is up and running, please continue on to setting up Chisel.