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Rick
Asked: 2016-12-02 09:59:53 +0800 CST

How may I start a VirtualBox VM and issue a command to that VM to launch a specific program?

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Given a fresh VM. Can I set up a desktop shortcut or CLI to start virtualbox and inside the VM launch a program?

Ideally, I may have to set up a function in .bashrc 

throwaway() {
    VBoxManage startvm "Stock-RHEL-7" --type headless
    ssh -X user@local-ip-address '$1'
}

That'd be called via

$ throwaway firefox

Is there a cleaner way to do this?

I need to do this to test desktop applications (over local X forwarding) on different distros of Ubuntu and RHEL. Some Q&A. Sometimes to sandbox packages we're evaluating. I don't want to pollute my base install of LTS/16.

(While I'm aware of X11 as an attack vector. We know the app sources. They are trusted.)

virtualbox

0 Answers