Pre-release Fedora Scientific Vagrant Boxes

I am very excited to share that sometime back the Fedora project gave the go ahead on my idea of making Fedora Scientific available as Vagrant boxes starting with Fedora 29. This basically means (I think) that using Fedora Scientific in a virtual machine is even easier. Instead of downloading the ISO and then going through the installation process, you can now basically do:

Trying it out before Fedora 29 release

As of a few days back, Fedora 29 rawhide vagrant boxes for Fedora Scientific are now being published. Thanks to release engineering for moving this forward.

Mac OS X Hosts - VirtualBox

Here’s what I did using VirtualBox on an OS X host. First, install vagrant. Then, from a terminal:

# Add the box
$ vagrant box add https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/Fedora-Scientific-Vagrant/Rawhide/20180613.n.0/images/Fedora-Scientific-Vagrant-Rawhide-20180613.n.0.x86_64.vagrant-virtualbox.box  --name Fedora-Scientific-Rawhide
==> box: Box file was not detected as metadata. Adding it directly...
==> box: Adding box 'Fedora-Scientific-Rawhide' (v0) for provider: 
    box: Downloading: https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/Fedora-Scientific-Vagrant/Rawhide/20180613.n.0/images/Fedora-Scientific-Vagrant-Rawhide-20180613.n.0.x86_64.vagrant-virtualbox.box
==> box: Box download is resuming from prior download progress
==> box: Successfully added box 'Fedora-Scientific-Rawhide' (v0) for 'virtualbox'!

..

Now that the box has been downloaded, we initialize a new VM:

$ vagrant init Fedora-Scientific-Rawhide
A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read
the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on
`vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.
MacBook-Air:Downloads amit$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
==> default: Importing base box 'Fedora-Scientific-Rawhide'...
Progress: 70%
Progress: 90%
..


==> default: Machine booted and ready!
..

If you see the above message, we are ready to start using Fedora Scientific:

$ vagrant ssh

The above will drop us into a terminal session on our Fedora Scientific VM. To be able to use graphical programs, we will change the above command to (please note I also needed to install xquartz to be able to see graphical programs from the VM on my host):

$ vagrant ssh -- -X

By default, the virtual machine is given 512 MB memory which is not enough for doing anything useful on your system. To change that, open the Vagrantfile that was created by the vagrant init step above. In that file, look for the block of code starting with config.vm.provider "virtualbox" and change the block to be:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
     # Display the VirtualBox GUI when booting the machine
     #   vb.gui = true
     #
     # Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
     vb.memory = "1024"
  end

The key above is vb.memory = "1024" which gives our virtual machine 1024 MB. If you want or can provide more RAM, adjust the value accordingly. Once done, do:

$ vagrant reload

This will recreate the virtual machine.

Windows hosts - VirtualBox

To be done (If you end up doing it, please let me know - see for a link at the bottom of this post).

Linux hosts - libvirt

To be done (If you end up doing it, please let me know - see for a link at the bottom of this post).

Linux hosts - VirtualBox

To be done (If you end up doing it, please let me know - see for a link at the bottom of this post).

Explore

Now that we have Fedora Scientific setup, head over to the docs to explore what’s in Fedora Scientific.