A quick start guide to installing RefPerSys

Objective
Setup
Procedure
- Provision the VM

Objective

RefPerSys is an AGI research project led by Dr. Basile Starynkevitch. The high level goals of RefPerSys are documented in the RefPerSys site and the source code is available on GitHub. RefPerSys is designed to run on Linux distributions, and this page is a quick reference on how to get RefPerSys up and running. Since RefPerSys is a research project, these steps may change in future.

Setup

We will be running RefPerSys inside a Debian 11 virtual machine managed by Vagrant. In this particular setup, Vagrant is running with the libvirt provider on Arch Linux, but other options (such as running Vagrant on Microsoft Windows with the VirtualBox provider) should work.

Procedure

Provision the VM

The first step is to prepare the virtual machine on which RefPerSys will run. In case a Debian 11 virtual machine (or bare-metal machine) is available, then this provisioning step can be skipped.

Create Debian 11 Vagrant box

We start off by creating a new Debian 11 Vagrant box in an `rpsrv` directory.

mkdir -p rpsrv
cd rpsrv
vagrant init generic/debian11

If all went well, the following should be displayed:

A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read
the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on
`vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.

Start the Vagrant box

We use the `vagrant up` command to boot up the new VM. Vagrant looks for a local image first, and if it cannot find one, it downloads the image from Vagrant cloud. The download process will take a while since the image is around 1GB in size (depending on the provider), and once done, the VM will boot up.

vagrant up

Output similar to the following is expected:

Bringing machine 'default' up with 'libvirt' provider...
==> default: Checking if box 'generic/debian11' version '4.1.6' is up to date...
==> default: Creating shared folders metadata...
==> default: Starting domain.
==> default: Waiting for domain to get an IP address...
==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
    default: SSH address: 192.168.121.141:22
    default: SSH username: vagrant
    default: SSH auth method: private key
==> default: Machine booted and ready!
==> default: Machine already provisioned. Run `vagrant provision` or use the `--provision`
==> default: flag to force provisioning. Provisioners marked to run always will still run.

Log into the Vagrant box

We can now log into the shell of the `vagrant` user in the newly created Vagrant box:

vagrant ssh

If successful, the following prompt should be displayed:

vagrant@debian11:~$

The subsequent steps will all be run from within this shell.