At Your Disposal

Debvm lets you quickly create a temporary virtual machine with a small memory footprint, ideal for testing scripts or mixing repositories

- Bruce Byfield

Debian developers have a habit of writing utilities for maintaining distributions that are also useful for ordinary users. For example, diffoscope [1], which compares binary files, is useful for both version control and comparing - among others PDF and LibreOffice files. In the past year or so, an equally useful utility called debvm has emerged. As the name suggests, debvm [2] is a tool for the quick and easy creation of virtual machines (VMs) running Debian releases and architectures [3]. While debvm gives developers the ability to test releases and architectures without changing hardware, it can be also be useful to any user as a sandbox for testing scripts or checking the results of mixing repositories. Where traditional virtualization methods such as VMware, VirtualBox, or Gnome Boxes create permanent VMs, often for the purpose of running another operating system, debvm is ideal for creating VMs for specific, limited purposes with a small memory footprint.

You will find the debvm 0.2.12 package in the repository of Debian 12 (Bookworm) and the 0.2.7 package in Ubuntu 23.04 repositories. Undoubtedly, other Debian derivatives will start to carry it as it gets closer to general release, although the current releases are stable enough to be worth exploring. The packages consists of three command-line tools: debvm-create, debvm-run, and debvm-waitssh. All three commands include intelligent defaults that make the bare command usable, as well as a handful of options each.

debvm-create