Portable Unprivileged NeuroDesktop
An experimental unprivileged option for running NeuroDesktop without Docker or Podman.
Minimum System Requirements
- At least 5GB free space for neurodesktop base image
- At least 8GB of RAM
Downloading TinyRange
TinyRange (https://github.com/tinyrange/tinyrange) is a lightweight runtime for running Virtual Machines and Containers. It runs without admin privilages and doesn’t need Docker or Podman installed to work.
- Windows: https://github.com/tinyrange/tinyrange/releases/download/v0.1.4/tinyrange-windows-amd64.zip
- MacOS: https://github.com/tinyrange/tinyrange/releases/download/v0.1.4/tinyrange-darwin-arm64.zip
- Linux (x86_64): https://github.com/tinyrange/tinyrange/releases/download/v0.1.4/tinyrange-linux-amd64.zip
- Linux (arm64): https://github.com/tinyrange/tinyrange/releases/download/v0.1.4/tinyrange-linux-arm64.zip
Windows on ARM: TinyRange is not currently supported on Windows for ARM (Copilot+ Laptops with ARM64/Snapdragon CPUs)
Downloading QEMU
- Windows: TinyRange already includes QEMU so you can skip this step.
- Ubuntu:
sudo apt install qemu-kvm - MacOS:
brew install qemu
Installing TinyRange
- Unzip the archive to some local path on your computer. It’s recommended not to extract it to a network drive.
- Open a terminal in the extracted archive and run
./tinyrange login. - Once you see the
tinyrange:~#typeexit.
Running NeuroDesktop
- Open a terminal in the TinyRange folder and run
./tinyrange login -c https://github.com/NeuroDesk/neurodesktop/raw/refs/heads/main/neurodesk.yml - Neurodesktop will start up. Copy and paste the Jupyterhub link at the end of the output to a browser.
- Use Control+C in the terminal to exit.
Folder Sharing
Use --mount ~/neurodesktop-storage to share neurodesktop-storage.
For example:
./tinyrange login -c https://github.com/NeuroDesk/neurodesktop/raw/refs/heads/main/neurodesk.yml --mount ~/neurodesktop-storage
The folder share is currently Read-Only. This will be fixed in the next update. To exchange files use the Jupyter Filebrowser upload and download functionality for now.
Changing CPU Cores, RAM, and/or Storage
- CPU Cores: Add
--cpu 8to set the VM to 8 CPU cores. - RAM: Add
--ram 8192to set 8GB of RAM for the Virtual Machine. - Storage: Add
--storage 16384to allocate 16GB of disk for the Virtual MAchine.
Enabling Hardware Acceleration
- Windows: This requires admin privileges. Search in your start menu for “Turn Windows features on or off.”. Find “Hyper-V Hypervisor” or “Windows Hypervisor Platform” and make sure it’s enabled. Then restart your computer.
- Ubuntu/Other Linux: It should already work out of the box. If not make sure your user account has permission to read/write
/dev/kvm. - MacOS: No extra steps required. It already works.