[Neurodebian-users] Provisioning the neuroscience VirtualBox image

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

Hi Emmanuel,

Interesting post -- thanks

On Wed, 10 Jul 2013, Emmanuel Kasper wrote:
> I am trying to build Vanilla ( if not "Official") Debian Images for
> VirtualBox/Vagrant, and I'd be interessted to shares experiences.

> I have been experimenting with Veewee for that purpose (I documented the
> steps here[1]) but I am moderately happy with the tool, so I am looking
> for alternatives.

veewee indeed sounds really nice and I did try using it at some point as
well.  My hurdle was is that it is Ruby-based and not packaged
(yet [2]) for Debian while having relatively heavy list of dependencies,
and integration with vagrant requires a custom build IIRC.

Despite all those shortcomings I think that some time in the
future we might migrate to it since it does look like a solid,
maintained, and expandable happen we need more backends (e.g. lxc-docker
[3]). 

> How are the VirtualBox images von neuro.debian.net produced ? Is there a
> kind of script / automated process ?

yes -- it is fully automated but YMMV since script evolved from an
ad-hoc setup, although we parametrized it (recently). See

http://github.com/neurodebian/neurodebian/blob/HEAD/vm/tools/nd_createappliance

so usually I use smth like 

./nd_createappliance -i ../../../neurodebian-images/debian-wheezy-DI-a1-amd64-businesscard.iso amd64

IIRC ;)

But what particular use-case/expansion are you looking to do?
may be our stock VM could be expanded to accommodate the need and remove
necessity for a derivative one to be created. Otherwise 
http://neuro.debian.net/derivatives.html
also might be of interest/relevance.

P.S. We might better of continuing this discussion on 
     http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/neurodebian-devel
     if you do not mind



> [1]https://wiki.debian.org/Veewee
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=658863
[3] http://www.docker.io/

-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Ph.D.
http://neuro.debian.net http://www.pymvpa.org http://www.fail2ban.org
Senior Research Associate,     Psychological and Brain Sciences Dept.
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik