Following the previous steps, we are now interested in getting a graphical environment with a VSCodium, the opensource rebuild of the VSCode IDE.

Configuring the display and development environment

From the previous steps we had a virtual machine where we can login with a debian user, and we can start configuring a graphical desktop environment.

• Install Gnome Flashback.

Gnome Flashback is a 2D version of the Gnome Desktop, it has a kind of year 2009 feeling but works well enough. We need a 2D desktop, as the Virtio display adapter does not work consistently with 3D enabled.

# inside dev-vm
# apt install task-gnome-flashback-desktop

• From the host connect to the VM display using a remote client:

$ virt-viewer dev-vm

or using the Remote Viewer app:

$ remote-viewer spice://localhost:5900

• Install the Spice Agent package. The Spice Agent provides a shared clipboard between host and VM, and also adapts automatically the VM display and desktop when the window of the Spice client is resized.

# inside dev-vm
# apt install spice-vdagent

• Add a VSCodium repo, via extrepo and enable it:

# inside dev-vm
# apt install extrepo
# extrepo enable vscodium
# apt update && apt install codium

• Ensure the VM starts automatically on boot.

$ virsh autostart dev-vm

It also makes sense to set our debian user to autologin in Gnome Fallback, and start Codium on session start.

This is how the environement should look like at this point:

Sharing source code from host to guest VM

Finally we need to make sure we have access in the dev-vm to our source code repositories. For this I will share the directory /home/manu/Projects/git which is containing all my git projects on the host, to the dev-vm using virtiofs.

The configuration of virtiofs is fortunately possible using virt-manager, which will save us some tedious XML editing.

Finally we mount the shared directory, and enable the mount on each boot.

# inside dev-vm
# mount -t virtiofs /home/manu/Projects/git /home/manu/Projects/git
#  echo '/home/manu/Projects/git /home/manu/Projects/git virtiofs defaults 0 0' >> /etc/fstab

So now we have an isolated dev environment where we can run untrusted code, with a very strong isolation from our host.