Installing a Debian GNU/Linux test server with VirtualBox

“There are a number of good reasons for installing a virtual
machine on your computer — as a way to run software that
isn’t compatible with your primary operating system, as a sandbox
for development, or as a place to test package installations, new
distributions, or new server configurations. Setting one up with
VirtualBox OSE is quite easy.

“My website for the Lunatics project is hopelessly out of date,
and I need to start doing something about it soon. The first step
in cleaning up the mess is to create a test environment on my local
computer so I can try out new configurations. The public server is
virtual, so it seems completely reasonable to test it on a virtual
system locally, and it’ll provide isolation from my everyday work
on this computer, without having to set up a whole new
computer.

“It also seems likely that I will need to maintain a Zope/Plone
package for Debian now that the ‘plone-site’ packages has been
withdrawn, and a virtual environment is a good choice for doing the
packaging. Finally, there are a few i386 architecture packages I
can’t run on this (AMD64) system, and so it’d be useful to have an
i386 architecture available.”

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