Debian Development Environment

Setting A Development Environment

Supported Linux Distributions

We recommend using Ubuntu 64-bit on a powerful physical PC (though using a virtual machine is also possible):
For Debian 9 and below, use either Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 64-bit.
For Debian 10 and above, use either Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 64-bit.

Note: When using distributions other than those listed, there may be issues.
Furthermore, Windows with WSL/WSL2 is not supported for development.

Installing Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit in VMWare Player

There are many tutorials on the web. For example:

• Setting up Ubuntu in VMWare
• VMware Player | How to install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

VMware player recommended settings

• Set the number of CPUs to the maximum possible.
• Set the memory size to at least 8GB.
• Set the disk size to be at least 200GB. 300GB is better.
• Use Bridge for networking.
• Install the VMWare tools.
• If you have an extra hard drive you can use it as a physical partition and set you home directory to it.
• Update Ubuntu right after the first login.

Using a docker container

Variscite provides Docker containers that can be used for a development environment as an alternative to using a virtual machine or a dedicated computer.

To learn more, please see Variscite's Docker Build Environment guide.