Vagrant on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Where is the DevOps for Yocto?

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The cozy world of DevOps has spoiled me with tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Packer. In the situations where I have a Linux machine already booted up, and sometimes already connected to the Internet, I can make things really easy on myself by slinging these tools in my usual way for repeatable, reproducible machines that may or may not come with the attendant headaches of immutable infrastructure (sorry, Nix, I’m not in love with you, I’m in love with the idea of you).

What scripting languages come out of the box on Debian 12?

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Poking around in a fresh VM in Vagrant, I see

bash
dash, a POSIX compliant shell linked under sh
python3, 3.11.2 at the time of writing
awk, specifically mawk
sed, if you count that (I do)
perl, specifically Perl 5

There may be others I missed.

Why I’m curious: Knowing that a language is installed by default on the most popular Linux distribution can simplify certain concerns considerably, which are of special interest to people who don’t work on Internet-connected boxes. Knowing that Python/Perl is already on there means that, provided your script only relies on the standard library, you should be able to just scp it over in a pinch and have it “just work”.

Quickstarts and Slowstarts

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I stirred up some controversy on Hacker News by talking about why I liked it when tutorials take you from clean VM to working, installed software.

I’ve since taken to calling this the “tutorial-in-a-box” method. When I write them myself, I usually put them under the header Slowstart, a riff on the proverbial Quickstart. Two examples:

A gentle introduction to reposurgeon.
The Slowstart for selkokortti, some flashcard generating software based around my Finnish language news archive.

The point of a Slowstart is to make it so that even absolute beginners can start to pick up some pointers about how people “in the know” of your chosen software ecosystem actually get things done. Instead of a Dockerfile or a shell script, you take them by the hand, spin up a totally fresh virtual machine from the ground up using something like Vagrant or virt-builder, and walk them through each and every command they need to execute in order to get to a working install.

The unreasonable effectiveness of VMs in hacker pedagogy

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

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.)

Vagrant lets you wrap VDI images

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.