How to make a FreeBSD vm in virtualbox.

[Allan Jude]

On 2014-12-31 13:06, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 03:17:23PM +0000, Glen Barber wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:04:38PM -0800, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>>
>>> On Dec 30, 2014, at 8:24 PM, Glen Barber wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 07:42:36PM -0800, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>>>> After he linked it to me, I decided that it would make sense if
>>>>> this was scripted and would really make sense as part of the release
>>>>> process.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> We already provide VMDK images.  There is nothing, that I can see, that
>>>> is different from how I've been testing the various images.  Creating
>>>> a new VM and attaching the VMDK to the disk controller is the intended
>>>> workflow.
>>>
>>> The difference is that with a vmdk you must get the exact
>>> combinations of items correct or you will wind up with a FreeBSD
>>> instance that will not boot.  With the ova, you just run a single
>>> command "VBoxManage FreeBSD.ova" and stuff "just works", or you can
>>> even just double click on the downloaded file from within your OS
>>> X / Windows/ whatever host and it "just works".
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I've written a script that will make a .ova that you can one-click
>>>>> import into Virtualbox (and I think Fusion as well) here:
>>>>>
>>>>>  https://gist.github.com/splbio/84bd4d2122782e99fc5c
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Can you send the script as an attachment?
>>>
>>> Uh sure.  It's attached.
>>>
>>
>> Your script relies on VirtualBox being installed on the build machine,
>> which I do not like.  This is one of the major reasons I'm happy Marcel
>> added VMDK support to mkimg(1) - all the components to create the
>> formatted disk image exist in the base system.
>>
> 
> Long ago I had created the quick and really dirty:
> https://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/vmdkimage-srcs/
> 
> This created ova files ready to be used in virtualbox (I had problem with vmware
> I don't remember why)
> 
> basically an ova file is a tar file in a given order with a template
> (FreeBSD.ovf) and a manifest with checksums)
> 
> This is really easy to produce and I agree it would be nice if we could produce
> one.
> 
> The matter for having something that worked both in vbox and vmware was playing
> with the disk controler.
> 
> What I did back in the time was generating an ova from vbox extracting the .ovf
> reducing to the minimum required the final ovf and ask people to import in in
> vmware (I do not have access to any vmware)
> 
> Now that we have mkimg that should be rather easy to create an ova generator at
> least for virtualbox (vmware compatible might be more tricky)
> 
> The interesting part is that the ova format is normalized and used by lots of
> the virtualisation tools out there
> 
> Best regards,
> Bapt
> 

I was going to say, I thought a .ova file was just a .tar of the .vmdk
and a .xml config file

It doesn't seem like virtualbox would be required if the .xml file was
generated and then checked into the tree

-- 
Allan Jude

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