Re: 'Official' Vagrant baseboxes

[Yaroslav Halchenko <debian@onerussian.com>]

Thank you Christopher for the post -- veewee indeed looks very neat and
it would be awesome if it got properly packaged for Debian [5].

As for the packaged virtualbox guest additions -- my wild guess (haven't
tried yet otherwise) is that people simply used stock
distribution-agnostic configuration, and that is why it was not
installed from debian's non-free package.

if someone ever gets to approach this task: stock veewee includes
already basic config for wheezy d-i beta4 ... due to duplication of
configuration files, i386 and amd64 preseeding diverged a bit with
correct seeding of keyboard layout in amd64.

To avoid duplication [1] of interest might be approach taken by opscode
people [2] (which also have their own squeeze templates
available).

[1] https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee/issues/463
[2] https://github.com/opscode/bento

On Tue, 18 Dec 2012, Christopher Gervais wrote:
>      would there be technical obstacles to use debian-installer with
>      preseeding instead of veewee ?

>    Actually, veewee already uses debian-installer. By default, to the best of
>    my knowledge, veewee does the following:
>    �* downloads & verifies an iso image
>    �* installs using a preseed.cfg
>    �* runs a series of shell scripts to:
>    � �* set up a sudoers file
>    � �* set up the 'vagrant' user
>    � �* configure grub for fast booting
>    � �* 'manually' install VirtualBox Guest additions, along with some
>    temporary dependencies
>    � �* install Ruby gems from source
>    � �* install Puppet and Chef from gems
>    � �* clean up, so as to minimize the basebox footprint
>    All of these are configurable in 'definitions'. We'll probably need to
>    maintain at least four (4) of these for stable/oldstable and i386/amd64.
>    Possibly more, if we want to maintain hurd or freebsd kernels...
>    I think the first steps will be to move as much as possible into the
>    preseed.cfg (e.g., puppet and chef installs), and investigate why the
>    packaged�VirtualBox Guest additions don't work.
>    ...
>      > The preferred tool for creating baseboxes is veewee (
>      > [4]http://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee). There is already an open ITP (
>      > [5]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=658863:) for it,
-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Postdoctoral Fellow,   Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik