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Re: Choice of VMs under i386 Stretch?



On 7/2/19 8:34 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>> I'm partial to VirtualBox.   Is that on any of the Debian DVD'S?
>> No, because it isn't free software.
>> See <https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox> for details.
>
> I believe what you wrote is slightly misleading: the base VirtualBox
> software seems to satisfy the definition of Free Software just fine.
> The above wiki page mentions two problems for Debian packaging:
> - There's a proprietary "add-on" for it, but that doesn't affect the
>   status of the base system.

Technically Debian places Virtualbox in Contrib since version 4.2
because a non-free component is required to build the BIOS.

> - There's a lack of interest from the main developers to provide
>   long-term support for older releases which made it too much trouble
>   for Debian's security team to provide support for it, so it's not in
>   Debian any more.

This is the primary driver as to why Stretch places Virtualbox in
backports, and why Buster will not have Virtualbox packages in the
Debian repo at all.

Additionally, Oracle no longer supports i386 versions of Virtualbox, not
since version 6.0.0.

For that reason I would not recommend using Virtualbox unless you are
intending to use the Oracle-supplied packages, and I certainly would not
recommend using the i386 versions.

-Matt



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