Creating a Debian VirtualBox VM

In the past, I used to use Parallels 5 for my VM needs (and I still do). Recently I have found out that in order to install the Parallel Guest Tools on the latest Ubuntu (10.10); I have to upgrade Parallels from version 5 to 6. Since Ubuntu updates every 6 month, it means that there is a good chance that I have to update Parallels every year on order for the latest version of Ubuntu to work. I have decided to check out VirtualBox and see how well it works with my Development environment.

To create a basic Debian VirtualBox image:

1. Grab the latest netinst image
2. For typical development use, I don’t think one will use more than 8GB of disc space.
3. Use the Guided hard disc setup and use the whole drive
4. Deselect everything else and only install Standard System
5. Install GRUB to your bootloader
6. Go through the system setup and reboot
7. Install OpenSSH server by apt-get install openssh-server
8. Run apt-get upgrade
9. Run apt-get update
10. Do a ACPI Shutdown via the Machine menu or run shutdown now
11. Edit the VM’s Settings via the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager
    I typically set:
    • Hardware clock in UTC time. This is to make sure that clocks are in sync so things like ssh won’t misbehave.
    • Disable Audio
    • Change Network -> Adapter 1 -> Attached to: Bridged Networking
    • Disable the Ports (both serial and USB)
    • Leave Shared Folders option unset, I just use SSH for everything.
12. Reboot, Login
13. Run ifconfig, the ip address will now be in your home network’s subnet (for me it is 192.168.123.0). So you can ssh into the machine via ssh username@ipaddress
14. Shutdown again and select Export Appliance under File in the VirtualBox Manager. Now, whenever you need a debian vm, you just have to import the appliance. At this stage. I also highly recommend you take a snapshot of the image before you do any tinkering.
15. Start the machine again, if you want to give the vm a static IP run nano /etc/network/interfaces
    Replace

    1 2	allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp

    with (IP Address and Gateway adjusted to taste)

    1 2 3 4 5 6

    iface eth0 inet static        address 192.168.1.10        netmask 255.255.255.0        network 192.168.1.0        broadcast 192.168.1.255        gateway 192.168.1.1

    Run /etc/init.d/networking restart

16. Next time, you can start the Virtual Machine via commandline by using VBoxHeadless -startvm “machinename”