Linux images for Virtualization

Some notes about Linux images for Virtualization.

To test some network tools or configuration, it can be useful to use multiple virtual linux machine. They can run with as little as 256Mo RAM and even less, 64Mo have been reported to work.

There are mainly two solutions:  https://www.virtualbox.org/ (free and opensource) and VMWare Player (free but less open). Also, there are free cloud services available (Amazon EC2 is free for one year for tiny configurations).

They each have "virtual appliances" ready to use (http://virtualboxes.org/ ; VMWare-Store ...) but there are no useful way to select one interesting. I took one from http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/.

Here I use Ubuntu 12.04 / VMWare Player 5,  

• Set the f## french keyboard. Run: sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup or sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration, depending on the Ubuntu version.
• Set the f## proxy with authentication.
  • If Gnome is installed:
    • gsettings set org.gnome.system.proxy.socks host 'fckng.proxy.enterprise.com'
    • gsettings set org.gnome.system.proxy.socks port 8080
    • gsettings set org.gnome.system.proxy mode 'manual'
    • gsettings set org.gnome.system.proxy.http authentication-user 'silly'
    • gsettings set org.gnome.system.proxy.http authentication-password 'dumb'
  • Otherwise (See this forum)
    • Generally: vi /etc/environment and add http_proxy="...", https_proxy="...", no_proxy="..." ...
    • For APT: sudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02proxy and add the line:  Acquire::http::Proxy “http://username:password@yourproxy:yourport″;
    • For wget: use .wgetrc ...
• Update Linux: sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get upgrade ; sudo apt-get install linux;
• Install the VMWare tools:    
  • There are some dependencies: sudo apt-get install build-essential linux linux-headers-$(uname -r)
  • In the VMWare window, there is a "Virtual Machine" menu to install a CDRom with the right tool version. Mount the CDrom and launch the installation
  • Re-run  vmware-config-tools.pl each time the kernel is upgraded.
  • Ref:  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Tools

That it.