We’re proud to announce that Multipass, the quickest route to a mint-fresh Ubuntu VM is now available for macOS as a beta release.
Our latest release, 2018.6.1, includes an installer for macOS 10.10.3 and later on 2010 or newer Macs.
Installation
After downloading the zip, double-click to unpack it and then double-click the resulting .pkg file. That will guide you through the installation.
You may want to install bash-completion from brew or MacPorts first to aid you in the terminal.
Usage
Run Terminal and execute:
multipass launch --name ubuntu-vm
You will then see multipass downloading the image (only once, or when there’s a fresh one) and preparing the instance for you. You can omit the --name flag and it will choose a name for you.
multipass shell ubuntu-vm
will then connect to the instance - you’re in a full Ubuntu environment now.
multipass help
shows an overview of the available commands, and
multipass help launch
will display a guide on how to use the launch command. Help is available for all the other commands as well, of course.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback, the open-source code is hosted on GitHub and that’s where you can report issues as well, or you can just reply below.
Indeed, we wanted to use the native hypervisor capabilities of macOS so we based off of hyperkit. Other than the VM driver, it’s all the same code that Multipass on Linux uses.
It will download the freshest image from http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/, configure and launch it for you. It will then keep track of the image changes so the next time you want a new instance, the image is already there for you.
You can use cloud-init to preconfigure the instance to your liking (see multipass help launch).
On OSX how do we use the launcher at the top of the screen to launch a different program than the horrible built-in “Terminal” application when we select “Open Shell”?