Oh if you're talking about students that use a combo of Mac & Windows & Linux:
Suggest VirtualBox --its free and can be installed and ported to each
But VirtualBox is based largely on Qemu; and for students, I highly recommend they become adept at running and using Qemu
I've booted and run many different operating system guest systems using Qemu--even an OS written entirely in Assembler
Believe it would be loads of fun for students to load and run many different operating systems with Qemu or distributions of Linux or any OS on the fly
But back to our original focus: Running Emacs Org-Mode on a Virtual Machine that is extremely portable--you can do this with Qemu--you can make your own Linux distro with Emacs Org-mode, make an ISO, a .iso file and boot and run it with Qemu
You can put it all on a USB key and run it on any machine--and then edit the .iso and add software later if you like
But enough about Qemu for student education etc.
Suggest:
* Install VirtualBox {on all 2 operating systems
* Make an virtual machine {Linux or Windows--maybe Mac would be a problem--but I just checked--you could host a VirtualBox virtual machine on a Mac so they should be able to do that (I used to run VMWare every day on my mac and huge Mac servers--booted and ran many virtual machines--it was awesome)
* Install Emacs & Org-Mode on the VirtualBox virtual machine & show your students, etc.=> reproducible research computing, at its best!
You name it in the virtual world & I've done it--and of course Emacs Org-Mode works great in ALL of them
KVM+Docker{which I posted to this group about previously}+VMWare+Qemu+VirtualBox+etc. --I agree with other person: You can find ready-made Docker containers running emacs--personally I didn't find it all that interesting--too restrictive--prefer VMWare Workstation images that I can easily make snapshots of--its great to have many development versions and easily trash something and just pull out another snapshot version to use instead if I don't like things {packaging or libraries can get messed up}
As much as I hate MicroSoft Windows, it pains me to suggest this; but, I suggest CygWin--which is a RedHat gift--you can just install your favorite Desktop like LXDE/XWindows/whatever--and run that right along with Micro$0ft WindBlowz--works great--right on top of it--I run Org-Mode on that too--lots of fun, highly recommend it
All the best software is ported to ALL platforms--Emacs is in that category of course
Alternatively you can FUSE filesystems together--so machines can become part of the directory of the machine you're most comfortable with {that runs your fave Org-Mode implementation}
Has anyone had any success in creating or using any kind of virtual machine that can work across platforms to run emacs+org-mode?
John
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Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803