## Part 1 of Basic Tools series

See Introduction to Mac2Net.com

In [[Posted 1.0 What is Mac2Net?]] , I introduced the software components for operating SHES. In **Part 1, – Getting Started** I am going to introduce how to quickly get started with building Linux virtual machines just with a Mac. In this post, I will introduce the basic tools for running a similar system on MacOS (Intel or ARM – Apple Silicon).
### Brew.sh
Before running out and purchasing a new Mini PC, and these days there are powerful and affordable ones the market, let’s get started installing the Fedora, etc on the Mac. My suggestion is to first install [Brew.sh](https://brew.sh) , “**The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux)**” .

With Brew, almost all the packages required to manage Self-Hosting services are available for MacOS with minimal to no impact on the Mac’s performance or disruption of one’s day to day use of Mac hardware. Brew can also install a few relevant GUI apps directly into the `/Applications` folder and by running `brew update` insure the machine has the latest versions.

### Lima
[LIma](https://lima-vm.io) is an open source software package developed primarily for MacOS to run lightweight Linux **virtual machines**. Lima is not opinionated – it offers templates for, as of this moment, 33 varieties of Linux and containers (more on containers later) as well as 12 experimental options and the ability for these templates to be modified according to one’s needs.

### Why run Lima on the Mac?
With Lima it is easy to install Fedora 39 Cloud Edition along with Cockpit in order to remotely manage Self-hosted edge services from a Mac using a web browser. Cockpit supports Cockpit-to-Cockpit connections over SSH (port 22) which basically means it is not necessary to open the Cockpit port (9090) on the bare metal server or any of the virtual machines in order to access it. This means it is easier to secure access to Cockpit from undesirables.

I usually run Lima on an Intel Mac Mini rather than my personal MacBook Air, although it is installed on this machine as well, in order to avoid it swallowing up precious heavily Apple-taxed Apple Silicon RAM – although through testing I learned that the actual RAM used when running in the background is relatively small. My Mac Mini has a bare minimum 128GB SSD and 64GB RAM, so there are a few more steps required in order to prevent Lima from clogging up my internal SSD which I will explain.

### What exactly is this ‘Cockpit’?

[Cockpit](https://cockpit-project.org) is the ultimate “it slices, it dices” tool to help you run your SHES. While other tools are still required, Cockpit is the fastest and most efficient way to manage a network and quickly investigate when unexpected situations occur, “what the hell is going on?”

### What’s the bottom line here?
Considering how one would manage hosted or cloud services, a Self-Hosted enthusiast is trading access to canned services for