Overview

This project creates an Xubuntu 20.04 box with software development tools installed.

Prerequisites

a working Packer installation
a working Vagrant installation
a working Hyper-V installation

Hyper-V Installation

The video How to Setup Hyper V on Windows is a great place to start. His use of toolbox for installation works well on Windows 10 and can be found here. Some highlights:

disable Enhanced Session Mode Policy
when creating the external virtual switch, name it LAN as this is what Packer is expecting to find

Base Xubuntu VM

Packer uses an existing VM as its source when creating the Vagrant box. This base VM should only have enough software installed to allow Packer to do its job.

Hyper V Settings

Select Generation 2
4096 of RAM (disable dynamic memory)
Select the external switched (LAN)
128 GB of disk space is sufficient
Select the Xubuntu ISO downloaded from the website. The current LTS is recommended.
Before starting the VM, make a few additional configuration changes
Disable Enable Secure Boot
Set Number of virtual processors to 2
In Integration Services disable Guest services and Backup
Disable Enable checkpounts
In Automatic Start Action, select Nothing
In Automatic Stop Action, select Shut down the guest operating system

Xubuntu Installation

Allow downloading of updates during the install
Username and password must be vagrant/vagrant or Packer and Ansible won't work
Reboot the VM and log in
sudo vi /etc/sudoers.d/passwordless with the following contents to enable passwordless sudo
sudo chmod 0400 /etc/sudoers.d/passwordless
sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl openssh-server linux-tools-$(uname -r) linux-cloud-tools-$(uname -r) linux-cloud-tools-common. See this ticket for details
reboot the VM
log in and obtain the VM's ip adderess: ip address
verify that the host machine can ssh into that address
shutdown the VM

%sudo    ALL=(ALL)  NOPASSWD:ALL
%wheel   ALL=(ALL)  NOPASSWD:ALL
Defaults !requiretty

Building

Type ./build.sh to build the server box.

Installation

The scripts will automatically install the newly built box into Vagrant's cache. Publication to Hashicorp's Cloud Platform must be done manually.

Tips and Tricks

Testing The Box

vagrant up will launch the server VM. Once you are satisfied that the box built correctly, use vagrant destroy to remove it.

Troubleshooting

Why is the display resolution of my VM so small?

You need to tell Hyper-V that you want to start your VM at a specified resolution. One way to do that is to open a Powershell with administrative rights and run Set-VMVideo -VMName 'my vm name' -HorizontalResolution 1920 -VerticalResolution 1080 -ResolutionType Single, replacing the VM name and resolution values. This cannot be done until after the Vagrant box has been created. Use the Hyper-V Manager to obtain the name of the VM. The VM must be off for this operation to succeed.

License and Credits

This project is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004.

kurron/packer-xubuntu-focal