Debian 7 on a VirtualBox

I'm currently taking a class on serious games. We've already covered Django and the nature of gamification. This week we are trying to deploy a simple Django project to Heroku, a cloud-based app hosting service. This proved fairly difficult, requiring that we get a long toolchain in place. (Details of that process to follow.)

This toolchain requires running scripts that download and install other required components. Whenever you're missing something, you get error messages that look like this:

  building 'psycopg2._psycopg' extension
  error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

You then have to figure out why you don't have vcvarsall.bat, or why it's not in the right place, and what you need to do to fix it.

Other students in the class reported that, since most of the required tools assume a unix-like environment, trying to get everything configured in Windows seemed to lead to even more problems. Also, project dependency managers like Ivy or pip always make me a little nervous. I don't really like the idea of downloading some dude's script from GitHub, running it, and having it download other arbitrary code from various points around the web and freely executing it all on my machine.

Given this context, I decided to create a Linux environment to work in. While I've dual-booted on a number of different machines before, I decided to try a virtual machine this time. There are a lot of advantages to this:

• No need to mess with your current partition configuration.
• Your can run the virtualized OS in a window, switching back and forth between the environments, even copying clipboard and file data between them.
• You can pause and save a running instance. (I've already used this feature: I paused a lengthy compilation/installation process so I could shutdown the real machine and then resumed everything again in the morning.)
• You can take a snapshot of the whole machine as a backup, which can be especially handy before you make any significant OS changes.
• You can copy the entire virtual OS environment to another machine. So, once you get your OS all configured, you're not bound to the original hardware.

For my virtual machine, I went with VirtualBox over VMware, since VirtualBox costs nothing and is open-source. Their provided documentation is pretty good too.

I then installed Debian 7 on it. (I actually did this twice, but here's what the process looked like the second time around. I'm assuming here that you know the basics of installing a Linux system.)

Due to previous Linux endeavors, I already had an ISO of the last stable Debian release (6.0/"squeeze") handy on a CD. (If I was doing this from scratch, I would grab a "testing" ISO instead.) I created a VirtualBox machine with a 12.0GB hard drive. (I hear this the only parameter you can't change once you create the machine.) Although it's a little slower, I went with a dynamically-sized file to save space on my host machine. I gave the machine 2GB of RAM and 1 CPU. (I'm used to running Linux on ancient hardware, so this is more than most of my installations get.) When I first started the virtual machine, it booted off the CD and began the installation wizard.

Debian's default Graphical Install worked out fine. When asked for what subsystems to install, I unchecked everything (including Standard System Utilities), so I had the barest machine possible. The default setup reserved 500MB of my 12GB for a swap partition.

The "stable" release tends to get outdated. For example, squeeze gives you Python 2.6. The current 2.7.3 is available in the "testing" release, and that will be updated within about a week of any new Python updates. So, once the installation was done, I edited my /etc/apt/sources.list to pull from "testing" rather than "squeeze". I then ran an apt-get dist-upgrade to switch over.

In upgrading, I got a new kernel. On rebooting, I found that my virtualbox guest services were not longer starting up properly. I would get this error:

AdditionsVBoxService error: VbglR3Init failed with rc=VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND

At this point, the only obvious problem this caused is my mouse scrollwheel stopped working, but I knew it could cause other problems later on. I eventually learned that I needed to install the appropriate linux-header package. (While I love the idea of Linux, this is an example of why I don't actually use it everyday. You upgrade something that's supposed to be routine and suddenly something else breaks with some arcane error that requires an hour to debug, some config file hacking, and some new packages to track down. <sarcasm>Oh, you're obviously just missing the necessary the kernel headers. Duh!</sarcasm>)

For my desktop environment, I used: apt-get install lxde. This is pretty minimalist desktop, but I figured it should still be snappy in the virtual machine. So far, it is responsive. It looks crude coming to it from Windows 7, but I find I don't mind so much when I have Windows 7 running in the background, a single click away! When I get some time, I'm curious to see how well the latest KDE runs under these conditions.

I also installed openjdk7 and Eclipse (which wanted openjdk6 and a bunch of other stuff).

At this point, I had a working virtual Linux machine. Time to put it to work!

LXDE in maximized window with Windows taskbar readily available below.