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[su_dropcap style="flat" size="5"]N[/su_dropcap]ow that Brew is installed on either your personal Mac or another Mac in the same network, let’s install Lima (Linux Machines) with the goal of firing up a Fedora Cloud instance and further learn more about what Fedora has to offer as a self hosted edge services platform.

Lima is sponsored by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This means Lima is seen as a useful tool for cloud computing even though it is basically designed to run locally on MacOS.

This is similar to the use case I am going to demonstrate, but instead of assisting in the task of cloud computing, Lima by supporting the Fedora Linux platform on the Mac will make it easier and safer to manage a self hosted edge services hardware platform running in the house or from a business location.

While Lima basically works the same for Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, there are differences in features and some options in the YAML templates provided by Lima-vm.io may not work on both hardware platforms. Except where specifically noted, assume the steps outlines below work on both Mac hardware platforms.

Installing Lima

Installing Lima in Brew is very simple. I also recommend installing socket_vmnet which enables a virtual machine to acquire a DHCP address in the same way as any other device on an internal network at home or office (security permitting). It is not necessary to enable this in order for a VM running on MacOS to reach the internet and I recommend not regularly using it when running Lima on a personal machine.

Fire up your favourite terminal app on the Mac. I use iTerm, but there are several choices out there as well as Apple’s Terminal.app.

While upon install, Lima is ready to go – just use the appropriate template to install a virtual machine of your choice – although socket_vmnet requires some configuration that will be prompted by Lima when installing/running a VM in bridge mode.