Using vagrant to run virtual machines with desktop environment

My company's development environment is based on virtual machines, running on VirtualBox. We would like to move one step further, and use the capabilities of Vagrant to have the description of the machine in a text file and then be able to "raise" that machine based on that text file. Combined to puppet, this would solve us the problem that everyone have different software versions installed in the VM.

However, Vagrant seems very focused to develop on the host, letting the machine in the background. We would need to have our development environment within the machine, so we would need a complete GUI, so when typing "vagrant up" a machine with a complete desktop environment (XFCE, KDE...) should appear.

So far, I've managed to create a "base" box from a Xubuntu distribution. But when I type "vagrant up", although the desktop appears, and I am able to login properly, Vagrant freezes at the message "Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...". After a while Vagrant crashes due timeout. So shared folders are not created, nor the package provisioner -puppet- is executed.

How to create a virtual machine with a complete GUI using vagrant?

I just got this working with basically three steps. The advice from askubuntu.com didn't quite work for me, so try this simplified version:

config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
  vb.gui = true
end

sudo apt-get install xfce4
sudo startxfce4&

That's it, you should be landed in a xfce4 session.

Update: For a better experience, I recommend these improvements:

$ sudo apt-get install -y xfce4 virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11
$ sudo VBoxClient-all

Update 2: Tried this today and the VBoxClient-all script isn't always installed. If it's missing, you can replace with the equivalent:

sudo VBoxClient --clipboard
sudo VBoxClient --draganddrop
sudo VBoxClient --display
sudo VBoxClient --checkhostversion
sudo VBoxClient --seamless

Here's Air's excellent answer in the form of a Vagrantfile

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  # Ubuntu 15.10
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/wily64"

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    # Display the VirtualBox GUI when booting the machine
    vb.gui = true
  end

  # Install xfce and virtualbox additions
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "sudo apt-get update"
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "sudo apt-get install -y xfce4 virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11"
  # Permit anyone to start the GUI
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "sudo sed -i 's/allowed_users=.*$/allowed_users=anybody/' /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config"
end

To start the vm

vagrant up

Login with username: vagrant , password: vagrant via the login prompt on the virtualbox GUI.

Start xfce

startx

My 2 cents

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ... other configuration

  config.vm.provision "shell" do |s|
    s.inline = "apt-get install lubuntu-desktop -y"
  end
end

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