Well, I would have loved to download preinstalled VMs and definitely believe that I personally would have saved time by downloading them, fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. I realize that as I was learning more and more about software, computers, installation and configuration that I was making the big mistakes and getting hung up when I actually took the time to read the slew of dialog boxes that were thrown at me instead of simply selecting the options that were the default settings. But I have to say there was a high degree of pedagogical/learning value in going over this. I definitely got better, more familiar with and more comfortable with setting up VMs as the semester progressed- setting up and running CMS based repositories not so much. Given my druthers and my fierce prejudice against the command environment, I would have liked to have started off with Omeka for an easy win to have some positive psychological momentum to carry me forward with Drupal, DSpace and EPrints (which I am still struggling to install so as to harvest from the Omeka OAI-PMH). As they told Napoleon: you've gotta defeat Austria before you invade Russia. Well maybe not, but in terms of tackling projects, I definitely like to pace things where I am handling things incrementally more difficult than the last project I accomplished.
However, as eternally dissatisfied with things as I know I can be, I feel if I had downloaded a complete VM, I know I would feel I had been cheated had I been denied the opportunity to build a VM from scratch, at least the first couple of times. Honestly, I wish there were some GUI method of doing it that did not rely on my deteriorating typing skills where I could just click on a series of radio buttons, especially with setting up DSpace with its Java and GreSQL variations. I guess the subsequent question for me is: what is now considered the baseline level of IT equipment and service that a library should have?
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