Preconfigured solutions

Downloading a pre-installed VM versus building your own.

I liked the experience of doing both. In our last project, downloading a self-contained VM with Omeka, I found the procedure fairly easy to do. The problem I ran into was in the transfer process of getting my collection from my host machine into the VM but I found a round-about way to get this done. Certainly, preconfigured solutions provide more time to concentrate on working on getting the collection in order. From a learning standpoint though, one would not want to skip the experience of installing a VM from scratch. Although the process is actually fairly easy to do, you go through the installation step by step and are able to control what gets installed. This gives you an opportunity to see in your mind how each building block is built, one on top of the other, to create the whole machine in the end. If I had not been through the experience of doing a basic install of a VM before (I must have done this 3-4 times already; maybe more because of mistakes) I think I definitely would have lost out on learning how a repository is structured and modified. At this point, I still don't think I feel comfortable running through the basic install without following Bruce's tutorial on YouTube. I did it once without following it and certain screens came up that I was uncertain of as what to do. Like anything, if I ran through it every day, I wouldn't feel the need to depend on Bruce.

My preference for one or the other? I like both. I like the feeling of succeeding after the full install. And I like the immediacy of viewing success with Omeka pre-installed on the VM. They both kept me on my toes.