Which Packages Are in Vagrant Base Boxes? - I Need A Desktop Environment

Question

How can I find out which packages are included in public vagrant base boxes without downloading them one by one and starting them up?

There is a list here http://www.vagrantbox.es/ but there is no info about them apart from the name and size.

I need one that already has a desktop environment included (KDE,Gnome,Xfce etc).

I don't really want to download a base then separately download/install the desktop using apt-get/yum etc. Creating my own base box from an existing one seems like a duplication of effort as surely someone has done this already.

Are there any public base boxes that already include a desktop environment?

Answer 1

The only way to see which packages are in the public vagrant boxes is to try and find the build scripts used to make them... most of the time they are on github.

Vagrant's main purpose is to run headless vm's so you will find the bases boxes are made to be as simple as possible, which allows customisation and makes the download size as small as possible.

This question describes how you could use a provisioner to customise a base box with a gui: Using vagrant to run virtual machines with desktop environment

If you don't want to go to the effort of customising a base vagrant box with a provisioner then it sounds like you might be better of skipping vagrant and just running a virtual box image directly... have a look here and see if there is anything that suits your needs better: http://virtualboximages.com/

Answer 2

Vagrant Cloud (now part of Hashicorp Atlas) can help with this. It is a catalogue of different boxes that people have created. You can use its search function to look for a desktop environment (KDE, xcfe, etc)

https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search

Add the box as normal (http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/getting-started/boxes.html) once you've found one that is useful for you