Vagrant

Here’s a secret. If you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed, and your colleague does too, then you can both bring up an near-totally identical blank slate Debian 12 Linux VM by running 1 2 3 4 5 6 mkdir tutorial/ cd tutorial/ vagrant init debian/bookworm64 vagrant up vagrant ssh . This works regardless of whether you or they are on Linux, Mac1, BSD, or even Windows. (Through the magic of aliasing, mkdir and cd even work in PowerShell....

At work I’m currently experimenting with using Vagrant to automate getting an entire local network of our tiny embedded Linux systems running all on my local box. Alas! One of our devices uses a custom Yocto distribution! But wait, we have scripts to run these as VDI images, and apparently that’s enough for Vagrant to get to work! 1 vagrant package --base my-virtual-machine Further reading materials for future me: Creating a Base Box, and the Box File Format....