
OSBoxes – Virtual Machines for VirtualBox and VMware - rayascott
http://www.osboxes.org
======
verytrivial
We have no particular reason to _trust_ any of these images though. An image
built from a reproducible-build-only distribution (if that exists) would be
valuable in this space.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Looking at the about page, this seems to be maintained by some college kid:
[http://www.osboxes.org/about/](http://www.osboxes.org/about/)

So I'd be tempted to cut the guy some slack and assume that any oversights are
from inexperience rather than malice.

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geerlingguy
Are there any open source Packer build configurations or anything else that
can be used to reproduce the base boxes from scratch? I wouldn't usually run a
base box that I can't also see/use the automated build scripts for.

For my own boxes (e.g. [https://github.com/geerlingguy/packer-
ubuntu-1604](https://github.com/geerlingguy/packer-ubuntu-1604)), I make sure
to prominently link to Packer configs licensed under the MIT license (based on
Chef's Bento project
([https://github.com/chef/bento)](https://github.com/chef/bento\))).

~~~
Chris2048
This is a great idea! Packer script repo?

Also, common repos can include open-builds..

------
justsaysmthng
That's really nice. I'll remember to use it whenever I need a linux box.

However, I'm not that interested in a zillion flavors of Linux.

I would be willing to _pay_ for a box which comes with Windows and Visual
Studio preinstalled (plus git, cmake, bash, etc):

In other words, an up to date development machine based on WinXP, Vista, 8, X,
etc.

The main reason is that it takes hours if not an entire day to install all
this stuff and run all the updates required to configure it.

As a Mac user writing cross platform C++, I sometimes need to test my app on
various flavors of windows and compile the code on various flavors of
compilers.

Keeping 30-50GB VM files ( for different versions of windows ) on my SSD is
kind of wasteful, since I only need these boxes once every month or so..

I would easily part with $5 or $10 or even $20 (if it's very urgent) for an
up-to-date box like that ..

~~~
zimbatm
And as a non-mac user I would really appreciate a OS X VM. I know it's
possible to build one but it's a lot of work.

~~~
a_imho
>And as a non-mac user I would really appreciate a OS X VM.

AFAIK that is a no-no according to the EULA, at least that was the case a
couple of years ago.

~~~
jmnicolas
It's still the case, the VM has to run on Apple hardware.

~~~
skrowl
It might LEGALLY have to run on Apple hardware, but it doesn't TECHNICALLY
have to run on Apple hardware.

If you live in a locality where the Apple licensing terms binding VMs to only
run on Apple hardware are not valid / enforceable, you can check this out -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wodqGvug6e0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wodqGvug6e0)

------
Elrac
Just to add another opinion:

(1) I didn't notice anything particularly horrible about the Web site. If I
manage to find stuff I need and don't have to wade through too much garbage,
and no attempt is made to trick or trap or scam me, I feel I'm getting what I
paid for and am happy enough.

(2) I pulled a Linux off the site, installed it in VirtualBox, and it ran,
smoothly, with no problem. Other offerings from other sites may have
more/better features, but sometimes "good enough" is good enough.

(3) The one thing I missed, here and elsewhere, is a Linux with built-in VM
Extensions (spiffy display drivers, better mouse / cut&paste / file transfer
support).

------
nickysielicki
Nothing makes me reach for my back button quite as quickly as a full-screen
"9001 PPL LIKEZ US ON TEH FACEBOOK PLEASE DO IT TOO" modal.

~~~
laumars
To be honest, the whole site is a homage to bad design clichés. It took me a
great deal more patience to navigate around than I'd normally gift a website.
But then I suspect this is aimed more at home users rather the enterprise,
which might explain some of the gaudy gimmicks.

~~~
cookiemonsta
its just a wordpress theme...
[http://newsmartwave.net/wordpress/porto](http://newsmartwave.net/wordpress/porto)

~~~
laumars
Wordpress theme or not, it was still chosen over and above better designed
themes in that collection. Plus some of the most distracting elements on that
page are stuff they've added which wasn't in the theme's demo:

* The main carousel images background is different from the background of the carousel itself. And since the images are quite small, it means the top section of the landing page looks disjoined when the browser window is sized to larger dimensions.

* The main carousel has lots of sunken bevels which makes the logos and text harder to identify and read. I'm not generally a fan of flat design, but things like that are meant to be instantly identifiable; so they should either be flat, or have a larger unified border around them (badly explained, but something like how the social icons are often bevelled, or how Apple shapes iOS apps).

* In the main title, "OSBoxes" has a different vertical alignment to the rest of the text.

* In the main title, "VMWare" and "Virtualbox" scroll in a vertical "carousel", which is very distracting.

* In the main title, the aforementioned vertical carousel has a blue background which is jarring against the rest of the white document. To be honest, between this and the previous two points, the dyslexic in me took a couple of attempts to parse the title. Which somewhat undermines the point of a title.

* Downloading a VM image requires clicking the OS to reveal a hidden dropdown, then clicking the download link. Given the amount of whitespace in that list, they could have just had download icons in the list and saved users a pointless click. Given you only need a download icon and a www icon (icons people are already familiar with), you could still have a clean usable design.

Anyway, I didn't mean this to slate the project based on the site. In fact
normally I wouldn't be so critical of someone else's site. Perhaps it's just
my dyslexia, or even just me specifically, but I really struggled to read
through this site in ways that I don't on most other websites.

------
gioele
Nostalgia time. In 2005 the university of Bologna set up OSzoo.org: A
repository of dozens of ready-to-run VMs for all majors free OSs:
[http://www.aboutus.com/Oszoo.org](http://www.aboutus.com/Oszoo.org)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20081206082548/http://www.oszoo....](https://web.archive.org/web/20081206082548/http://www.oszoo.org/wiki/index.php/Category:OS_images)

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drcongo
This website just looks like spam. Is it offering anything that vagrantbox.es
doesn't?

~~~
sciurus
I'm surprised vagrantbox.es is still around; Hashicorp had been offering box
discovery themselves for a while now.

[https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search)

------
opensourcedude
Downloading untrusted images off of a site that you've never heard of before.
What could possibly go wrong?

~~~
finishingmove
"Like us on FB" popup. Yikes. Isn't uBlock supposed to block this stuff?

~~~
SNvD7vEJ
Also, animate the shit out of the visitors.

 _puking while trying to hit the back button_

------
spy4hire
Or just start from scratch with [http://netboot.xyz](http://netboot.xyz).

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s0l1dsnak3123
I use OSBoxes a lot when I want to quickly spin up a Linux distro I don't
normally use. I really wish they'd clean up the design of their website
though...

------
seaghost
Highly recommended.
[https://github.com/boxcutter](https://github.com/boxcutter)

------
andybak
What I really want is a good repository for ready to go 'application
appliances' \- something pretty much production ready - and in a format that I
can deploy to a VPS as well as locally in a VM. I know there's a few of these
in existence but the selection always seemed a bit patchy.

Can anyone point me towards a good source?

~~~
rwmj
Vagrant or virt-builder, I guess.

With virt-builder we are trying to persuade Linux distros to start publishing
high quality metadata about their cloud and VM images. Then virt-builder will
just pull down those images automatically. It's been a very long and slow
process. So far we can only support Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and (coming shortly)
CentOS.

Even though Red Hat sponsors the project, we've still not managed to get
either Fedora or RHEL to publish metadata, after 2+ years of trying. But I
believe this method of publishing metadata is the way to make the whole
process sustainable long term.

Edit: I should say I didn't read your original posting closely enough. It
sounds as if you're looking for fully formed applications (eg. PostgreSQL or
whatever) in appliances. Personally I wouldn't use an existing appliance like
that for trust reasons (also the reason I'm not over-keen on half-baked Docker
repositories), but with virt-builder you can do something like:

    
    
        $ virt-builder centos-7.2 --install postgresql-server
    

which will provision a PostgreSQL VM on your local machine in a minute or two.
(And yes, it does work as non-root)

~~~
andybak
> It sounds as if you're looking for fully formed applications (eg. PostgreSQL
> or whatever)

I'd like to see a good opinionated base stack for say Django (i.e. Postgres,
uwsgi and redis) as well as fully fledged installs for stuff like Sentry,
Gitlab, Zulip and similar apps.

We've of course built our own Django deploy using Ansible but I'd like to see
some community efforts that are shared and get reviewed, critiqued etc.

------
vhiremath4
Docker Hub. That is all.

------
ronkwan
is this spam? the page will try to you force you "like" or "share" their page
on Facebook

------
ComSubVie
What's the benefit of OSBoxes in comparison to Vagrant and others?

~~~
koolba
I have no clue what the advantages of OSBoxes are but I know what like about
Vagrant: _being able to see how the box is provisioned_

Rather than having a VM be some magical preconfigured black box, I can peak at
the Vagrantfile to see all the steps to convert a stock Linux host into a
database/cache/MQ/xyz. From a security perspective it's much nicer too as one
can reduce the level of trust to: 1) Do I trust the root box? 2) Do I trust
the subsequent commands?

~~~
stormbrew
Note that unless you rebuild the .box yourself, you probably still can't
actually trust it any more than one of these. Building a .box with a fake
Vagrantfile inside is not really difficult.

~~~
y4mi
obviously, he said so himself as well...

but creating basic baseboxes is pretty easy with hashicorps packer and the
bento packerfiles repo on github.

------
AdmiralAsshat
I've used the site in the past when trying to preview distros. Website design
aside, it's not bad.

I totally understand the security risk, but really, as long as you're only
spending a few hours with the VM to see what the distro is like, exactly how
much damage can you do in a VM anyway?

I was thrilled to try FreeBSD with KDE pre-installed to play with, since I had
tried previously to manually install a desktop environment on FreeBSD and
borked it.

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bobwaycott
Safari on a very recent Mac, sitting in a café.

1\. Click link

2\. See blue spinner on white background

3\. Think, "Hmm ... okay."

4\. Wait 5 seconds

5\. See a popup box asking me to "Like" this on FB

6\. Stare in bewilderment, as I still haven't actually seen any content on the
page

7\. Click the _X_ button to dismiss the Like spam

8\. Back to staring at that blue spinner

9\. Wait a couple more seconds, still no content

10\. Close tab

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antihero
What exactly does this offer over Vagrant or better yet having a single Docker
VM and using containers??

~~~
gnu8
These have my backdoors preinstalled.

