I turned off my Raspberry Pi a couple of weeks ago, I was concerned about its energy draw. FFS. 😲 Also the projects I planned had stalled but like the No 11 bus, another one has come along, So I decided to install a Raspberry Pi in my virtual box instance. Here’s how …

  1. How to make a VM and install an intel version of the OS, because ARM binaries won’t run in a VB VM.
  2. How to make the guest additions, on my version of the guest OS, it needs to be done from the command line, and thus the disk needs to be inserted using the VB menu options, although this article shows how to install the guest additions, it’s not working as I’d expect, i.e. the full screen does not behave as such and it reminds me of the early days of Linux. I installed XRDP, it does not come as a default, and RDP’d onto it. Works fine, very odd.

I found some runes to install the Guest Additons, because this version of raspbian does not have the guest additions as a package. I decided to not install it on the second build and use RDP. The runes are in the comments and somewhere else on the internet.

Whats next

Step 1 – set the FDQN

Does this help?

  1. q=how+to+set+an+fdqn+in+a+virtual+box+vm
  2. https://superuser.com/questions/609171/how-can-i-add-a-fqdn-to-a-centos-vm-running-on-virtualbox
  3. virtual box view forum ‘windows hosts’ & https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/
  4. Or this, Set your hostname and Fully Qualified Domain Name, from gridscale.io, it’s just the hosts and hosts.conf

I found this too hard, or too poorly documented. So I gave up on using the VM; I could not work out how to configure the FQDN and the router which is a BT Home Hub.


Step 2 – install a mail server

See, https://raspberrytips.com/mail-server-raspberry-pi/ , https://davelevy.info/wiki/my-little-mail-server/ which points at https://cnedelcu.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-to-set-up-simple-mail-server-debian-linux.html (dated 2014 😇)

or https://www.tecmint.com/install-postfix-mail-server-with-webmail-in-debian/ (dated Oct 2017)

Step 3 – install an app

See Mastodon and Diaspora, perhaps docker, but that seems to have gone very quite

2 Replies

  1. How to set the FQDN,

    1. Use ifconfig to discover the ip4 address
    2. choose an FQDN
    3. Use an editor to insert a line in /etc/hosts ${ip-number}[tab]${fqdn}
    4. then set the hostname hostname ${FQDN}
    5. on Raspbian, service networking restart
  2. Some how this became corrupted, the panel refused to dispaly and I had to rebuild it; I chose not to install the guest additions, I access the VM via putty or rdp. I have copied the virtual guest runes to this comment.

    sudo apt install build-essential module-assistant dkms
    sudo m-a prepare; sudo sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
    
    

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