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I'm the maintainer of PartKeepr, a GPL3/FOSS electronic component inventory management softwre. I've been asked to build a VM image so people can quickly evaluate the system in their environment. The VM is based on Debian Wheezy.

However, there are a few things to consider:

  • How to easily enable the user to customize the keyboard settings, timezone and other basic OS settings?
  • Is there anything to consider apart from the stuff above? Like networking? (I'm planning on setting the VM as DHCP client, but I'm sure I'm missing something here)
  • Anything else?

1 Answer 1

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To make your VM available to other users, you're going to want to export it as a VirtualBox Appliance. This allows your users to later import the virtual machine into their own VirtualBox environment. The option for that is available from the File menu in the VirtualBox Manager.

You should make sure to have SSH enabled and mention the username/password close to the download link for the VM. THis allows the user to SSH into the virtual machine and they won't run into issues with the keyboard layout. Once they're logged in through SSH, they should be able to adjust the system configuration as they need. The settings you mention are adjusted with these commands respectively:

  • dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
  • dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Regarding the networking. Setting it up with DHCP is probably the safest option.

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