VirtualBox Appliance Image Creation

This article describes the details on how to create a VirtualBox Appliance with Raspberry Pi Desktop operating system.

First Time Setup

1. Grab the latest ISO release from the Raspberry Pi Foundation website.
2. Download and install the latest release for your system, both the platform package and extension pack.
3. Create a virtual machine with following settings:
   1. Name: Raspberry Pi Desktop
   2. Type: Linux
   3. Version: Debian (32-bit)
   4. RAM: leave it at 1024 MB
   5. Create virtual hard disk: keep it at 40.00 GB and select as type VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk)
   6. Change current settings of the created VM and enable the clipboard in General/Advanced, set 64 MB in Display/Screen and enable the PAE/NX bit in System/Processor
   7. Enable Host I/O Cache on the SATA Controller in Mass Storage to get an extra performance boost
   8. Load the ISO image from step 1. in the optical drive
4. Start the VM and wait until the ISO file has been loaded and select to install the operating system. Follow all suggested instructions until the Raspberry Pi Desktop is loaded for the first time.
5. Select to install the Guest Extensions. If the files on the virtual CDROM are not executable simply copy them over to the virtual hard disk and execute them from there.
6. Open a terminal window and execute one of the following commands (choose the master branch the get the latest stable):
   1. curl https://rainerum-robotics-rpi.github.io/raspbian-mods/rpi-setup.sh | bash
   2. curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rainerum-robotics-rpi/raspbian-mods/master/rpi-setup.sh | bash
   3. curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rainerum-robotics-rpi/raspbian-mods/develop/rpi-setup.sh | bash

VirtualBox Appliance Preparation

1. Use the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool from the start menu to configure the keymapping (for ex. en-uk).
2. Reboot the VM and select in the GRUB bootloader screen Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux and then select Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux U.VW.X-Y-686-pae (recovery mode).
3. Wait until the terminal has finished loading and execute the command prepare-vbox-appliance. After the script has finished it will shut down the VM automatically.
   • If you can not get into the recovery shell try this instead: In the GRUB2 menu select the recovery option and press the e key to edit the boot entry. At the line with the linux kernel linux /boot/vmlinuz-... ro single append init=/bin/bash then press F10 key to boot the system. Once the terminal loaded type /usr/local/bin/prepare-vbox-appliance to execute the image preparation process.
4. With the VM shut down export the image as an appliance as explained in the documentation.