OSBoxes – Virtual Machines for VirtualBox and VMware
osboxes.org
osboxes.org
Yeah, that'd be amazing. Know of any?
So I'd be tempted to cut the guy some slack and assume that any oversights are from inexperience rather than malice.
For my own boxes (e.g. https://github.com/geerlingguy/packer-ubuntu-1604), I make sure to prominently link to Packer configs licensed under the MIT license (based on Chef's Bento project (https://github.com/chef/bento)).
Also, common repos can include open-builds..
However, I'm not that interested in a zillion flavors of Linux.
I would be willing to pay for a box which comes with Windows and Visual Studio preinstalled (plus git, cmake, bash, etc):
In other words, an up to date development machine based on WinXP, Vista, 8, X, etc.
The main reason is that it takes hours if not an entire day to install all this stuff and run all the updates required to configure it.
As a Mac user writing cross platform C++, I sometimes need to test my app on various flavors of windows and compile the code on various flavors of compilers.
Keeping 30-50GB VM files ( for different versions of windows ) on my SSD is kind of wasteful, since I only need these boxes once every month or so..
I would easily part with $5 or $10 or even $20 (if it's very urgent) for an up-to-date box like that ..
The reason I ask is that Hashicorp's Packer[1] is awesome at doing things like that.
Personally, I have an automated Packer build that spins up Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, provisions it and installs all of the necessary software, and then preps it for Windows Deployment Services. I originally based the work off of packer-windows[2] but ended up re-rolling most of it again from scratch.
If you don't mind spending roughly a day or two figuring it out, then it's well worth it!
[1] https://www.packer.io/ [2] https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows
Somebody could use packer and publish the artifacts on a website, were I can download the desired image and have it running in 5 minutes. That's what I'd pay for.
You could basically schedule/cron/whatever the job to build once a month/week/day on your machine and it will always dump the up-to-date virtual machine in the location you choose.
I should also point out that Packer is the program that they use to create Vagrant boxes.
AFAIK that is a no-no according to the EULA, at least that was the case a couple of years ago.
If you live in a locality where the Apple licensing terms binding VMs to only run on Apple hardware are not valid / enforceable, you can check this out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wodqGvug6e0
Scott Hanselman has an older blog post [0] that describes how he does it with a Surface 2. With an official Remote Desktop client for Macs, it should be just as easy. As a bonus, you can run it on an A11 Standard (16 cores & 112 GB of memory), although I wouldn't want to leave it up for a month ($1200).
[0] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UsingASurface2RTARMToGetActual...
But the main reason for wanting things local, for me, is that the sole reason I have a Windows VM is to plug various devices into it for which there's no software for OS X or Linux. Yes, there are hacky methods for some USB use cases, but I don't think having the logic controlling my laser cutter executing 12 hops away is going to go so well.
(1) I didn't notice anything particularly horrible about the Web site. If I manage to find stuff I need and don't have to wade through too much garbage, and no attempt is made to trick or trap or scam me, I feel I'm getting what I paid for and am happy enough.
(2) I pulled a Linux off the site, installed it in VirtualBox, and it ran, smoothly, with no problem. Other offerings from other sites may have more/better features, but sometimes "good enough" is good enough.
(3) The one thing I missed, here and elsewhere, is a Linux with built-in VM Extensions (spiffy display drivers, better mouse / cut&paste / file transfer support).
* The main carousel images background is different from the background of the carousel itself. And since the images are quite small, it means the top section of the landing page looks disjoined when the browser window is sized to larger dimensions.
* The main carousel has lots of sunken bevels which makes the logos and text harder to identify and read. I'm not generally a fan of flat design, but things like that are meant to be instantly identifiable; so they should either be flat, or have a larger unified border around them (badly explained, but something like how the social icons are often bevelled, or how Apple shapes iOS apps).
* In the main title, "OSBoxes" has a different vertical alignment to the rest of the text.
* In the main title, "VMWare" and "Virtualbox" scroll in a vertical "carousel", which is very distracting.
* In the main title, the aforementioned vertical carousel has a blue background which is jarring against the rest of the white document. To be honest, between this and the previous two points, the dyslexic in me took a couple of attempts to parse the title. Which somewhat undermines the point of a title.
* Downloading a VM image requires clicking the OS to reveal a hidden dropdown, then clicking the download link. Given the amount of whitespace in that list, they could have just had download icons in the list and saved users a pointless click. Given you only need a download icon and a www icon (icons people are already familiar with), you could still have a clean usable design.
Anyway, I didn't mean this to slate the project based on the site. In fact normally I wouldn't be so critical of someone else's site. Perhaps it's just my dyslexia, or even just me specifically, but I really struggled to read through this site in ways that I don't on most other websites.
And the faq (aside from a zero-content privacy comment) doesn't even mention malware concerns, which is a pretty weird elephant to ignore if you're on the up and up.
puking while trying to hit the back button
Can anyone point me towards a good source?
The downside is everything then is fragmented depending on the builder you choose (ansible vs whatever).
With virt-builder we are trying to persuade Linux distros to start publishing high quality metadata about their cloud and VM images. Then virt-builder will just pull down those images automatically. It's been a very long and slow process. So far we can only support Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and (coming shortly) CentOS.
Even though Red Hat sponsors the project, we've still not managed to get either Fedora or RHEL to publish metadata, after 2+ years of trying. But I believe this method of publishing metadata is the way to make the whole process sustainable long term.
Edit: I should say I didn't read your original posting closely enough. It sounds as if you're looking for fully formed applications (eg. PostgreSQL or whatever) in appliances. Personally I wouldn't use an existing appliance like that for trust reasons (also the reason I'm not over-keen on half-baked Docker repositories), but with virt-builder you can do something like:
$ virt-builder centos-7.2 --install postgresql-server
I'd like to see a good opinionated base stack for say Django (i.e. Postgres, uwsgi and redis) as well as fully fledged installs for stuff like Sentry, Gitlab, Zulip and similar apps.
We've of course built our own Django deploy using Ansible but I'd like to see some community efforts that are shared and get reviewed, critiqued etc.
Rather than having a VM be some magical preconfigured black box, I can peak at the Vagrantfile to see all the steps to convert a stock Linux host into a database/cache/MQ/xyz. From a security perspective it's much nicer too as one can reduce the level of trust to: 1) Do I trust the root box? 2) Do I trust the subsequent commands?
but creating basic baseboxes is pretty easy with hashicorps packer and the bento packerfiles repo on github.
I totally understand the security risk, but really, as long as you're only spending a few hours with the VM to see what the distro is like, exactly how much damage can you do in a VM anyway?
I was thrilled to try FreeBSD with KDE pre-installed to play with, since I had tried previously to manually install a desktop environment on FreeBSD and borked it.
1. Click link
2. See blue spinner on white background
3. Think, "Hmm ... okay."
4. Wait 5 seconds
5. See a popup box asking me to "Like" this on FB
6. Stare in bewilderment, as I still haven't actually seen any content on the page
7. Click the X button to dismiss the Like spam
8. Back to staring at that blue spinner
9. Wait a couple more seconds, still no content
10. Close tab