Reproducible and portable development environment

Vagrant configuration for a Ubuntu virtual machine with a bunch of basic, necessary and useful development related packages preinstalled mostly for C.

Download and install Vagrant and VirtualBox

• www.vagrantup.com
• www.virtualbox.org

The packages that Vagrant installs in the VM on the first startup (and on each provisioning) can be browsed in / commented out from / added to instpkgs.sh.

The setlimits.sh shell script is also executed by vagrant on provisioning (like 1st startup) in order to have some system wide settings done regarding the core file generating and message queue limits. Feel free to comment them out or modify as needed.

Once Vagrant and VirtualBox are installed, and optionally the modifications in the configuration file and/or in the provisioning scripts are done, the Virtual Machine can be booted up from its directory.

git clone https://github.com/xsnpdngv/vagrant.git
cd vagrant
vagrant up

After the VM is booted up, it can be reached through either the builtin ssh command: vagrant ssh, or with the standard ssh program.

ssh -p 2222 ubuntu@localhost

In order to have X11 forwarded to the host machine from the guest OS, the host OS first has to run an X server. For Windows MobaXterm might be a good and lightweight choice as such; for MacOS XQuartz is the standard way; while on Linux having an X server is not a question.

After having the X server run on the host, the VM has to be ssh'd with X11 forwarding option enabled (the Vagrant configuration enables this kind of access), and a program with GUI can be simply run and displayed...

ssh -X -p 2222 ubuntu@localhost
xterm &