This is the original recipe used by Morten Werner Forsbring to create the first NAV virtual appliance.

A virtual machine was created on a VMware ESX server with 512MB RAM and 4GB of disk. Choises made during installation of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (aka. etch):

• American English as language
• using LVM on the disk to ease the expand-process
• all files in one large partition

After a normal installation, the following changes are made:

• the user added at install-time was removed
• so was the root-alias in /etc/aliases pointing to that user
• backport.org- and pkg-nav.alioth.debian.org-mirrors added to /etc/apt/sources.list
• installed open-vm-tools (from backports.org) and ran the commands module-assistant prepare open-vm and module-assistant auto-install open-vm to build the opem-vm-modules
• installed openssh-server
• added 'ALL: 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow and 'ALL: ALL' to /etc/hosts.deny
• installed nav (aptitude install –without-recommends nav) and answered yes to all question
• followed /usr/share/doc/nav/README.Debian
• poweroff the machine and take a snapshot
• Remove the network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces.
• Change the temporary root-password to an empty one in /etc/shadow (and remove /etc/shadow-).
• Adjust hostname in the following files: /etc/hosts, /etc/mailname and /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf
• Power off the virtual machine and export as appliance.

• document how to make the appliance send emails