Lately I needed to test a project under Debian Squeeze 64 bit. I found several 32 bit boxes but no 64 bits. So I decided to build one of my own.

Quickstart

To get up and running you just need to:

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gem install vagrant
vagrant box add squeeze64 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/937870/VMs/squeeze64.box
vagrant init squeeze64
vagrant up

Details

The base box has the following characteristics:

• 275Mb in it’s packaged form;
• 8Gb hard drive;
• Debian Squeeze with a linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64 kernel;
• fr_CH keyboard layout;
• Debian packaged ruby 1.8;
• Debian packaged puppet 2.6.2-4;
• Chef 0.9.14 installed as a system wide gem;
• VirtualBox Guest Tools 4.1.0r73009;

Recipe

For those interrested in the details, the box was built by
following Vagrant’s instructions for creating base boxes

Cleanup

In order to reduce the packaged VM’s size, a little bit of
cleaning up was required. The following steps where used:

Inside the VM:

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sudo aptitude install zerofree
sudo apt-get clean
sudo rm -rf /usr/src/vboxguest*
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/doc
sudo find /var/cache -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;

Then halt the VM with vagrant:

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vagrant halt

Restart the VM with VirtualBox and log in as root (the root password was set to ‘vagrant’ during previous steps):

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init 1

Type the root password and then:

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mount -o remount,ro /dev/sda1
zerofree /dev/sda1

Update (10/12/2011): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.4 and the latest Debian Squeeze updates.
Update (12/02/2011): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.6 and the latest Debian Squeeze updates.
Update (02/08/2012): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.8 and the latest Debian Squeeze updates.
Update (03/25/2012): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.10, chef 0.10.8 and the latest Debian Squeeze updates.
Update (04/04/2012): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.12 and the latest Debian Squeeze updates.
Update (29/04/2012): The package has been updated to the latest Debian Squeeze updates and the nfs-common package was installed.
Update (05/08/2012): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.14 and the latest Debian Squeeze updates.