VM's for TAG

tl;dr: google drive link for the VMs. You only need to download one of these. Download VirtualBox or vmware, then select File->Import or File->Import appliance, and select the ova file from the link of your choice. The default password is tagiscool, though I strongly suggest changing the password to something else once you download it.

Introduction

Assembly is a very OS/platform-dependent language.

What that means is if I have a Windows laptop, and you have a Mac computer, the way we write assembly greatly differs between the two platforms (even though both computers operate as a x86 architecture).

As such, to make it easier for everyone follow along and try the code (and not having to worry about it being wrong), I have set up a three different VMs, which are ALL linux based, more specifically Ubuntu-based: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Elementary OS.

Breakdown of Distros

These three separate distros all have nasm/nasmx installed and have SASM (which is a x86 assembly IDE) installed!

The difference, really, is in the aesthetics and in the look-and-feel. Elementary OS is built to look more like a macOS computer and Linux Mint is built to look more like Windows. Because they are all linux-based, you can run similar commands, and write similar assembly programs, and they will build on those. You should also be able to fully follow what we are doing without modifying anything. Screenshots below:

To install, follow the google drive link, and you will get three ova files in a folder. Each of these ova's correspond to each of the above screenshots. You only need to choose one of these. Once you choose your pick, you will need to download VirtualBox or VMware to run this. In VMware you can select File->Import to import ova files, and in VirtualBox, you select File->Import appliance to do so.

Each of these has a default username ubuntu and default password tagiscool (don't tell anybody about this). I strongly suggest changing this password right away!

Manual Installation

If you somehow can't run a VM, or if you just simply hate Ubuntu, you can also just manually install all these things. This the link to my build script used to build the VMs (don't guarentee that that will work on all machines), or you can follow these install instructions as well.