I would love to see a guide on how to create a virtual machine for Armbian which would be great for testing in VMWare Workstation, Player or Virtualbox.

 

It would be similar to the diet pi vm which autoboots into the qemu (I think) for the Raspberry Pi

 

If someone has a rough guide on how to do it I can make something noob friendly.

 

My guess is you need to install qemu, add some repositories and then get it to autoboot using rc.local or something like that. Any resources on how to get started would be much appreciated.

It would be similar to the diet pi vm which autoboots into the qemu (I think) for the Raspberry Pi

 

Why should this image emulate a Raspberry Pi? It's a minimal x64 Jessie install containing the whole bunch of scripts that make DietPi somewhat special.

Why should this image emulate a Raspberry Pi? It's a minimal x64 Jessie install containing the whole bunch of scripts that make DietPi somewhat special.

I started looking at the DietPi VM in more depth and alas it does just seem to be minimal debian with the official repos.

 

My original inquiry still stands then since I believe the armhf debian repo differs slightly from the non-arm one, it would be valuable for testing to build an armbian for qemu.

That image is a normal X86 virtual image with, I assume, the same package base. I don't see much point in dealing with that ... but If you need that, install a base X86 Debian / Ubuntu system and https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/blob/second/deboostrap.sh#L138-L143 ... and you are close to Armbian. Special things are anyway very much hardware related, which aren't emulated.

 

BTW: Next build script release brings some important upgrades in user configuration:

- user patches for sources

- user kernel configs

- adding packages per distribution

...

 

All without touching the base script.

@blindpet

If you want to test Debian or Ubuntu for arm without desktop environment (and not specifically Armbian with its custom kernel and hardware-specific tweaks), then you might be able to boot it in a container environment (Docker, systemd-nspawn, lxc) on top of, for example, Ubuntu Wily (x86 or x64).

@Igor, I agree just using a minimal debian running some installer is not that useful. I do a lot of testing for making guides and want to emulate the arm chips and use the right repo. Reasons for this are compilation testing and using mono or java apps that may behave differently on non-arm devices. It would also provide users a nice test environment they can easily restore to fresh when tinkering, saving more sd card flashes for added convenience.

 

@zador, if you have any resources or how-tos for these that would be cool. I only recently started playing with docker. I'd like to do minimal nested virtualization if possible.

I'm playing with systemd-nspawn (since my test environment for armbian build script is Ubuntu Wily). I'll test later if minimal Ubuntu or Debian for arm will boot with qemu and binfmt-support.