Trying out the Raspberry Pi Developer VM v0.8

Howdy,

Russell Davis (aka ukscone) released the new Raspberry Pi Development VM v0.8 on Sunday, so I downloaded and gave it a try. It can be downloaded here on element14 at:

http://downloads.element14.com/downloads/RaspberryPi-Development-VM-v0.8.ova

However, it is 8.2 GB, so you may find the torrent to be a better option:

http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/tools/ukscone/RaspberryPi-Development%20VM%20v0.8/RaspberryPi-Development%20VM%20v0.8.torrent

It is a .ova file which is an exported VirtualBox virtual machine for developing software for the Raspberry Pi. It contains configured targets for Fedora Remix, Debian & Arch. There is plenty more info in Russell's readme:

http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/tools/ukscone/RaspberryPi-Development%20VM%20v0.8/README.txt

However, he does caution "as things currently stand this VM does not actually emulate any of the RaspberryPi hardware" and "it is only meant to help build/port software using desktop tools".

Well, now, let me give a quick look at what I did:

1) I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 and did not have VirtualBox, so I installed it this way:

apt-get install virtualbox-ose-qt

If you are on another OS, then check out the VirtualBox website to download and install the correct version for you:

https://www.virtualbox.org/https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

2) Then I had to import the downloaded .ova file into VirtualBox which I did via:

VBoxManage import RaspberryPi-Development-VM-v0.8.ova

I hadn't used VirtualBox before so please comment if there is a better way to do this. It did take a noticable amount of time to finish (~15 min), and I pretty much couldn't do anything else on my system during it due to the load. Here's a screenshot of my terminal:

3) Finally I was ready to fire up VirtualBox which I did via Applications->Accessories->VirtualBox OSE in my GNOME desktop (consult the VirtualBox website for details on other OSes). I clicked ok through a couple dialogs about configuration and then finally the VirtualBox manager window opened:

4) I happily clicked the Start button and the VM booted. It is an Ubuntu system running LXDE. To do a quick test of the cross-compliation, I typed up a quick C program and compiled it for the ARM target:

And that's all I've done so far. I'm thankful that Russell put in the hard work to make it easier for everyone else. He mentioned that he will release updates as just tarballs, so folks will be spared having to do the massive download again. I'm very curious to see if some clever people get emulation working in the VM, so that the executables could be tested out. I also think this VM could be useful once I eventually get a Pi and want to take advantage of my laptop's Intel horsepower to compile additional software I may need.

Has anyone tried this VM (or others)? I'd be interested to hear what your experience was like and what you are using it for.

Cheers,

Drew

bodgy over 13 years ago

Looks like torrent is the way to go, twice I tried to download the complete file and each time it bombed out at 248MB.

Maybe it was the 8 hour download time ti didn't like.
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bodgy over 13 years ago

With the Windows based version of Virtualbox, you only need to double click on the OVA file and VBox will auto import it and have it ready to run. Assuming the latest version of Vbox.
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fustini over 13 years ago in reply to bodgy

Good to know. An alternate direct download is:

http://files.velocix.com/c1410/RaspberryPi-Development%20VM%20v0.8/RaspberryPi-Development%20VM%20v0.8.ova

But I agree that this file really begs for BitTorrent.
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fustini over 13 years ago

FYI - I've been following Andy Taylor who has been tweeting about his experience with a beta RPi and Russell's VM:

https://twitter.com/#!/andytuk/status/179722467655421952
I've been SSHing from Pi to VM to run the build. Then copying files via SCP. Worked fine. Get 1Mb per second SFTP from VM to USB HDD
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Former Member over 13 years ago in reply to fustini

he actually didn't use my VM as it was too large but he followed the instructions I wrote up on my blog on how to set one up. For those that know which distro they are going to use when they get their RPi then rolling their own might be the way to go especially as they don't have to put up with the defaults I used.

The only difficulty that you might have rolling your own is that now all three currently released rootfs's come as sd card images rather than tarballs of the directory tree so there is an extra step required to turn the image into a directory tree but that's not a big deal as it's just calculate an offset and mount the image from that offset.
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fustini over 13 years ago in reply to Former Member

Thanks for the correction (and the VM). That's interesting to know about mounting the SD card image - not sure why I had been thinking about as being opaque.
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rew over 13 years ago in reply to fustini

Another way to get at the files is to prepare your SD card like you would if your 'pi could be in the mail tomorrow. i.e. dd the image to the SD card. Then take it out, and reinsert it (to reread the partition table. you can also blockdev --rereadpt /dev/....). Now you can mount the root partition on the SD card. The kernel will read the partition table to figure out the offset.
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ukonline2000 over 13 years ago

login in need a password???
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fustini over 13 years ago in reply to ukonline2000

From the readme, the logins for the VM should be:
Two accounts have been created:

root/toor
raspberrypi/password

Cheers,
Drew
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ukonline2000 over 13 years ago in reply to fustini

Tks
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