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Building X86 Images with Virtualbox 5.1 on a Windows PC and using a Debian jessie virtual machine as the build host.

It will work in a similar way on Linux as well.

Simple guide

• Download the latest VirtualBox 5.1 version and install on your Windows PC, include the Guest Additions (extensionpack )

• Download the Debian Netinst CD image

• Start a Debian virtual machine by booting from that image:

• There is a nice description here: Link to brianlinkletter

• Complete the virtual machine settings with adding the preferred memory size, number of CPU’s, “bridged” as network Adapter (works best for a volumo environment in your own network). Default is legacy boot (via Syslinux), in case you wish to emulate UEFI, you need to tick the corresponding box in "System"

Start building

• Start the virtual machine and install the pre-requisite packages:

git squashfs-tools kpartx multistrap qemu-user-static samba debootstrap parted dosfstools qemu binfmt-support and qemu-utils

• Clone the build repo as described on http://github.com/volumio/Build

  git clone https://github.com/volumio/Build build

• cd to build and type

  sudo ./build.sh -b x86 -d x86 –v myversion

• You do not have to build the architecture and the image at the same time. Example: Build the architecture for x86 first and the image version MyVersion in a second step:

  sudo ./build.sh -b x86 sudo ./build.sh -d x86 -v MyVersion (this is my preferred method while working on the build scripts)

• Create a folder on windows, which you will use as a shared folder between Virtualbox machines and Windows.

• Go to your Virtual machine settings and configure Shared Folders and point to the folder you just reserved, make it permanent.

• After running the 2 scripts (see above), you will have a Volumio-dev.vmdk image in the build folder, copy this to the shared folder (/media/)

• Back to Windows, create a new virtual machine, give it a name and the OS type (hintyou’re your name starts with debian, it will automatically select OS type debian). Then select an existing vmdk image from the shared folder you copied Volumio-dev.vmdk to.

• Complete the Settings for memory, cpu’s, legacy/uefi, network adapter

• In fact: you should be able to start a virtual machine from any image you have in the debian box, you can convert it to a vmdk image like this:

  qemu-img convert <image.img> -O vmdk .vmdk