hello All, This is not necessarily a skywater-related question, but I guess there is expertise here to help me out and it may help others too. I'm trying to set up a server which can host virtual machines to use both the digital and analog flow opensource software. The idea is that anyone inside my research center can access them safely, and be able to open the graphic interface to do schematics, layout, etc., hosted by this server. This would normally happen from a Windows guest. My main questions are: • Is this possible? • Which operating system do I need? I've checked Ubuntu Server, would this allow to have the graphic user interface of e.g. Magic even if it doesn't have a desktop? Or you better recommend to install Ubuntu desktop on the server? • How to set up the virtual machine part? I guess this is a long process but any hints would help, e.g. tutorials or videos. I would like to know what to set up at the server side and also at the guest house. • Also: are there any security risks I should take into account? Thanks a lot in advance for the help.

I think CentOS has been the Linux variant of choice for the containers, as it seems to be the most compatible with the largest number of tools, especially OpenROAD. Magic works through an X11 interface; even the OpenGL and Cairo graphics interfaces are built on top of X11 protocol, which means that your server need not have a graphical user interface, as it is the client that will provide the graphics. I do know that klayout will be an issue because I'm aware of problems we've had just getting it to create a chip die plot in batch mode processing, because it wants to draw directly to a frame buffer (of course, magic should be used to make die plots because no software tool makes better die plots than magic). For technical issues relating to the virtual machine itself, I'll defer to those with more expertise in the matter.

thanks a lot @User what are the arguments against Ubuntu? it seems a lot of people use it and thus there's more information going around on the other hand, @User mentioned some issues using docker with CentOS, do you know anything about this?