Linux VM

The scripts in this repository create a VM image containing a Debian 12 (bookworm) system. It can be used as a base for a showcase, a VM used in a workshow, etc.

The scripts should be run on a Debian system. Furthermore, create-vm depends on the debootstrap package, and image-to-ova depends on the uuid-runtime and qemu-utils packages.

Type ./create-vm --help or ./image-to-ova --help to display a list of all available options.

Building the Image

The command

./create-vm image.img

creates a raw VM image file image.img. It uses either sudo or su to run as root, and may prompt for the root password.

Creating the image file on a RAM disk speeds up the process, but note that about 6 GB of free space are needed in the directory where the image file is created.

Testing the Image

The following command can be used to test the generated image with qemu:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -cpu kvm64 \
    -machine accel=kvm \
    -smp 4 \
    -m 8G \
    -drive file=image.img,if=virtio,media=disk,format=raw \
    -nic user,model=e1000

Converting the Image to a Virtual Appliance

The command

./image-to-ova image.img VM

creates a virtual appliance VM.ova (and other files). The appliance is optimized for VirtualBox, but may work in other virtualization software.

Note that create-vm installs the VirtualBox guest utilities into the image.

If the VBoxManage utility is installed, create-vm uses it internally to convert the image file, otherwise it uses the qemu-img command.

The Virtual Machine

When the virtual machine is started for the first time (or after the cleanup-shutdown command has been used; see below), a dialog is shown during bootup to select the keyboard layout and variant.

The password of the root user is empty. An unprivileged user account with the username user exists in the virtual machine; its password is empty as well.

The command cleanup-shutdown (to be run as root) can be used to clean up the virtual machine after further setup (e.g., after installing additional software). It removes log files, caches, and history files, resets the desktop environment configuration, discards unused disk blocks, and shuts down the virtual machine.

Discarding usused disk blocks decreases the size of the virtual image file. It may take several minutes.