Raspbian x86 on VirtualBox on a Windows PC

Oracle's VirtualBox is a user-friendly way of installing a virtual machine on a PC. In short, you can run a computer inside your computer - for example, the Raspberry Pi desktop inside your Microsoft Windows desktop. There are lots of other products that also do this, but VirutalBox is one of the easiest to use.

I find this useful for when I'm travelling and want to work on Raspberry Pi projects. I do usually pack at least one real Pi, but having it all on my laptop is a huge convenience.

If you just want to do Raspbian desktop or terminal work, though, this is just the job.

Prerequisites

I tried this using Microsoft Windows 10; it'll probably work with Windows 7 and 8 too. You can also do this on a Mac or Linux PC; if you're using one of those, the installation of VirtualBox may be different, but the setup should be mostly the same.

Just about any PC with 4GB RAM and a dual-core processor will do, but you'll get best performance if your processor has Intel's VT-X or AMD's V technology. If you don't have this, or don't know how to check, don't worry about it. If you don't intend to do much else with your PC, you could get away with as little as 2GB RAM.

Downloads

Creating the Virtual Machine

Install VirtualBox just like any other Windows program; find the file you downloaded, and double-click it. Alternatively you may find it in your browser's Download area and there may be an "open in folder" or "launch" button.

Run VirtualBox and click the New icon, then enter:
Name: Whatever you like. Keep it short. I suggest rpi or raspberrypi.
Type: Linux
Version: Other Linux (32-bit)
Click Next

Hard disk
Select Create a virtual hard disk now
Click Create
Select VDI (the default)
Click Next
Select Dynamically allocated (the default)
Click Next
Select 8GB
Click Create

Installing Raspbian x86

You'll now see your machine in the VirtualBox window, with "Powered Off". You now need to attach the Raspbian x86 ISO file to the imaginary CD-ROM drive.

Select your machine and click the Start icon. You will shortly see "Select start-up disk". You should select the Raspbian x86 .ISO file that you downloaded earlier, and click the Start button.

Use the up and down keyboard keys to select Graphical Install then press the Enter key. After a moment, you'll see a list of languages; select yours, then click Continue.

It'll buzz through a bit of setup (Loading additional components). Give it a couple of minutes.

Next you'll decide how to use the pretend hard drive. For convenience, I suggest you leave it at "Guided - use entire disk" (the default) and click Continue. It'll show the one and only virtual hard drive; click Continue again.

Now it'll ask you about partitions; again for convenience, leave it at "All files in one partition" (the default) and click Continue. You should now see "Finish partitioning and write changes to disk" highlighted; just click Continue.

(If you leave it at "No", you'll just go back a step; click Continue and you'll carry on again.)

Now "Installing the System"; it'll install the Raspbian files on the virtual hard drive. This is the bit that can take a while. Assuming you selected "British English" as your language, you should now make a cup of tea. Otherwise you can go and eat some grits, whatever they are.

Eventually (3-10 minutes or so), you'll be asked "Install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record?"

(If you accidentally click "Enter device manually" then just click Go Back and repeat the last couple of steps.)

Good news! "Installation Complete". It tells you a load of guff about removing the CD-ROM, but you don't need to worry about that, just click Continue.

You'll then see the Debian GRUB screen, which is a bit whirly, and then a couple of seconds later you'll see something that looks really worrying, but actually isn't.

"A fatal error has occurred" - just click OK. We need to change one setting - simple!

Click the Settings icon, System (on the side bar), Processor (on the tab, top middle) and tick Extended Features - Enable PAE/NX. Then click OK. Thankfully you only need to do this once; it should be remembered for all future times.

Now click Start. You'll see the VirutalBox startup screen, the swirly GRUB screen, then the Raspbian desktop will start to load.

You can now use the Raspbian PIXEL desktop! But it's a bit smalll and cramped - 640x480 size. Also, you can't copy and paste between the virtual Pi and the real Windows desktop. Let's sort out those niggles.

Guest Extentions

Raspbian x86 will mostly work out-of-the-box with VirtualBox. However you can make it even better by installing VirtualBox Guest Extensions to the virtual Raspberry Pi, which lets the virtual Pi know that it's not real and that it exists inside another computer. This will allow you to resize the desktop, and enable copy & paste.

How to install the Backports Repository in Rasbian Stretch

In Raspbian Stretch (late 2017 onwards), the VirtualBox Guest Extensions are no longer in the standard Raspbian repositories. You need to enable the Debian Backports repsitory. To do this, you will also need to install the Debian authentication keys. Type in the following. Press Enter at the end of each line.

sudo apt update sudo apt install -y dirmngr sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 8B48AD6246925553 sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 7638D0442B90D010 sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d echo "deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main contrib non-free" \ | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list

Alternatively, if you still can't get the Guest Extensions from any repository, you can follow this guide by Andy Barnes to install Debian Stretch VirtualBox Guest Additions. Note that Andy's method requires compiling code from source, which might take a while depending on how powerful your host PC is. Once you've completed Andy's method, you can skip the apt update / apt install instructions in the next section, but you'll still need to reboot your virtual machine with sudo shutdown -r now

Installing Guest Extensions

sudo apt update sudo apt install virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-x11 linux-headers-$(uname -r) sudo shutdown -r now

Those brackets are the ordinary brackets, not the curly nor square ones. If only you could copy and paste it, rather than having to type it in... (you could enable SSH, but let's not go there now).

When prompted "Do you want to continue?", press the Y key and press Enter. It'll take a little while to download and install the extensions.

(Did you notice how the virtual Pi inherited your real PC's internet connection? Neat, isn't it?)

You can now resize the window to whatever screen size you like. You can also set a defined size, such as 1280x720 or 1920x1080, by going to VirtualBox's View - Virtual Screen 1 - Resize to (whatever you fancy).

If the Raspberry Pi desktop does not automatically resize to fill the new windows size, use VirtualBox's View - Auto-resize Guest Display menu to fix this. You may need to click a running program for the virtual Pi to notice the change and resize the task bar.

Copying and Pasting

By default, this is turned off in VirtualBox. Once you have the virtualbox-guest extensions installed, then you can use VirtualBox's Devices - Shared Clipboard - Bidirectional menu to enable copy and paste between the virtual Pi and your real PC.

You can also enable the clipboard through VirtualBox Settings icon - Advanced - Shared Clipboard - Bidirectional. You'll still need Guest Extensions installed, though.

Turning Off

Sharing Folders

With Guest Extentions installed, you can share folders between the host PC and Raspbian guest; i.e. you can make a folder on your real PC available inside the virtual Pi. You'll need to add the pi user to the vboxsf group as per Peter WA Wood's instructions (thanks, Peter - Peter WA Wood's website is full of various interesting Linux, BSD, *nix and MacOS articles, take a look). Go to the terminal on your virtual Pi and enter:

You will need to completely log out and back in again to pick up this change; you may find a reboot easiest:

You can then share folders from Virtual Box using Settings - Shared Folders and click on the folder add icon. Folders will appear under /media with the prefix: sf_

What's Missing?

There are a few things that Raspbian x86 doesn't have, that it would have if it were running on a real Raspberry Pi:

Minecraft and Wolfram are, I suspect, licencing issues. The GPIO ports are a physical vs. virtual thing, but the Sense HAT Emulator (in the Programming menu) seems to work for Python programs.

Also bear in mind that you're just running the Raspberry Pi PIXEL Desktop and Raspbian Linux for Intel architecture - you're not emulating the ARM processor of real a Raspberry Pi. So you can't copy over binary executables from a real Raspberry Pi and expect them to work - they won't. However, source code and scripts such as Python, Scratch and Bash will work, as will anything that you install using apt from the repository (because some very nice volunteers have recompiled almost everything in the Raspbian repository for both ARM and Intel architecture).

Enabling SSH - Virtual Network and Port Forwarding in VirtualBox

Another difference between virtual Raspbian x86 and a real Raspberry Pi, is that there is no DOS boot partition (there is a /boot folder, but it's not the same thing), which would be used by the real Raspberry Pi hardware to start and set various initialisation settings. You can place an "ssh" file inside the /boot folder, and that does appear to enable SSH upon reboot, but you'd have to be already booted up inside the virtual machine to put the file there, so it seems a little pointless. Also there's no point in a "wpa_supplicant.conf" file to configure WiFi, because the virtual Pi inherits whatever network your Windows PC already has - it doesn't interface directly to a WiFi adapter (it could, if you configured VirtualBox to take ownership of a USB port, but let's not go there).

Instead, to enable SSH, use the Raspbian menu - Preferences - Raspberry Pi Configuration feature, select the Interfaces tab, and set SSH to Enabled. Alternatively you can use sudo raspi-config from the command line. Reboot when done.

You will also need to expose port 22 outside the virtual network. To do this, from VirtualBox, select Settings, Network, Advanced, Port Forwarding and click the Add icon. Beware that Microsoft Windows may already be running an SSH server on port 22 so you may need to forward port 22 (Guest Port) from the virtual Pi, to a different port such as 2222 (Host Port). You don't need to worry about the Host IP or Guest IP; leave those fields blank and VirtualBox will assume sensible defaults.

You can then SSH to port 2222 (or whatever) on localhost from your Microsoft Windows desktop, for example using PuTTY. If you need to SSH from outside your Microsoft Windows machine, you may need to check your firewall.

Don't forget to change your virtual Pi's password.

The IP address of your virtual machine is a bit interesting; essentially, by default, VirtualBox creates an imaginary router with network address translation somewhere in the 10. IP range. You can find your virtual Pi's IP address by hovering over the network icon at the top-right of the Raspbian desktop, or you can issue hostname -i from the command line. Outbound routing (from virtual machine to real machine and real world) is configured automatically; inbound routing (from real world to virtual machine) is not, hence you have to set port forwarding. For example if your virtual Pi is on 10.0.2.15 then you can't (by default) reach it from your Microsoft Windows desktop using that IP; you have to use port forwarding from localhost. There probably is a way of doing inbound routing in VirtualBox, but to be honest that's an advanced topic for which I'd expect you to be using a more hardcore virtualisation host. It probably wouldn't be too hard to have multiple virtual Pis all chatting away to each other on VirtualBox's 10. virtual network though.

Once you've got SSH running, you might want to run the virtual Pi headless (i.e. without showing on the Windows desktop); from VirtualBox, click the little drop-down triangle next to the Start icon, then click "Headless Start". To turn it off, either issue the sudo shutdown -h now command from SSH, or right-click the "Running" item in VirtualBox, select "Close" - "ACPI Shutdown". Another top headless tip is that you can boot without the desktop by doing sudo raspi-config, selecting "3 Boot Options" and then "B1 Desktop / CLI".

And Finally...

If you found this article useful, please make a donation - however small - to Cotswold Jam, the family-friendly coding & electronics club that I run in Gloucestershire. We run entirely on donations, we don't claim tax relief nor taxpayer-funded grants, and in addition to running four workshops for 60 children five times a year, we try to give away GPIO electronics kits. All cards are accepted and you don't need a PayPal account. paypal.me/cotswoldjam