I had to set up a fresh Linux virtual machine for my Juniper SSL VPN games after losing the old one some time ago.

Last time I used the Fedora distribution and it worked great, so I stuck with it. It’s now at version 10 and comes with a stripped-down variant called AOS, short for Appliance Operating System.

This AOS variant doesn’t have a GUI and is intended for appliances like gateways or web servers. It’s perfect for my VPN networking purpose because it is very small on disk, uses very little memory and boots quickly. In its original form it is not usable in VMware Fusion so I had to convert it to the VMware format with the virt-convert tool first.

I put up the resulting VMware files for download here:

http://www2.entropy.ch/download/f10-i686-aos.zip

I also registered it in VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace as a community upload.