Virtual Debian test/dev setup

I decided to switch my multi-virtual machine test/dev setup over to a minimal Debian install, not least because I couldn’t keep my mind off the fact that I was carting around a full desktop installation along with various ‘pretty’ desktop backgrounds, system administration for GUI-monkeys applications, and god knows what else. One batch of this stuff is bad enough, but repeated N times it’s too much for me to handle.

I also can’t help viewing those VMware ‘appliance’ things with suspicion, and I’m starting to put real data on these things now, so I went for a clean install from debian-40r1-i386-netinst.iso. Doing the initial setup via the VMware Server console, viewed via VNC, is unbelievably painful but all that was needed after the actual install was to reconfigure the networking and install sshd before getting back to a nice clean SSH login.

I’m slightly cross with myself for not having scripted the rest of the setup yet, but on the other hand I’m pleased I was anal enough to document it all in the first place, because all I had to do was copy the commands out of my previous posts here and paste them into the SSH window to get back to where I was. I also set up Debian to use sudo, because I prefer that to using su.

The only differences in all the setup steps from the previous ‘doing X on Ubuntu’ posts due to the change of distribution were:

• The m4 package was already installed.
• Instead of libssl-dev, I needed openssl.
• I left out the detail of how to fix ejabberdctl. (added as a comment to that post)

I didn’t go as far as the Mnesia data import stage, stopping instead after installing and testing Erlyweb, for reasons that will become apparent later. For the record, the steps were:

• Erlang
• Ejabberd
• Jabberlang
• YAWS
• ErlyWeb