In the same spirit as Debian Squeeze 64 Vagrant Base Box this post describes a new Vagrant base box for Debian Wheezy. Wheezy is currently the unstable version of Debian, meaning the box is a constant work in progress. I will update this post each time the box is upgraded.

Quickstart

To get up and running you just need to:

gem install vagrant
vagrant box add wheezy64 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/937870/VMs/wheezy64.box
vagrant init wheezy64
vagrant up

Details

The base box has the following characteristics:

  • 395Mb in it’s packaged form;
  • 8Gb hard drive;
  • Debian Wheezy with a linux-image-3.2.0-1-amd64 kernel;
  • fr_CH keyboard layout;
  • Debian packaged ruby 1.8;
  • Debian packaged puppet 2.7.10-1;
  • Chef 0.9.14 installed as a system wide gem;
  • VirtualBox Guest Tools 4.1.8r75467

Recipe

For those interrested in the details, the box was built by following Vagrant’s instructions for creating base boxes to create a Squeeze box which was then upgraded to Wheezy.

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:

sudo aptitude purge cpp-4.3 gcc-4.3-base
sudo aptitude purge cpp-4.4 gcc-4.4-base g++-4.4
sudo aptitude purge python2.6 python2.6-minimal
sudo debfoster
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:

vagrant halt

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

init 1

Type the root password and then:

mount -o remount,ro /dev/sda1
zerofree /dev/sda1
  • Update (04/01/2012): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.10, chef 0.10.8 and the latest _Debian Wheezy updates.
  • Update (04/04/2012): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.12 and the latest _Debian Wheezy updates.
  • Update (29/04/2012): The package has been updated to the latest _Debian Wheezy updates and the nfs-common package was installed.
  • Update (05/07/2012): The base box has been updated to Virtual Box Guest Additions v4.1.14 and the latest _Debian Wheezy updates.