vm-images

Shared, locally cached virtual-machine installation media and base images. Downloaded ISO, QCOW2, IMG, VHD, and VHDX files are intentionally excluded from Git.

Download images

Download every supported image:

./download-images.sh

Download or check selected targets:

./download-images.sh debian13
./download-images.sh almalinux10
./download-images.sh fedora44
./download-images.sh ubuntu2604
./download-images.sh virtio-win

The Windows installation ISO is not downloaded because Microsoft's temporary download URLs expire. Place it manually in install-iso/; the script finds it automatically by matching Win, 11, the architecture (x64, or arm64 on arm64 hosts) and .iso in that order (*Win*11*x64*.iso or *Win*11*arm64*.iso, case-insensitive). If several files match, the highest version-sorted name is used. Check which file was picked with ./download-images.sh --print-path windows11 --iso.

Query image paths

The path interface prints one absolute path without downloading anything:

./download-images.sh --print-path debian13
./download-images.sh --print-path almalinux10
./download-images.sh --print-path fedora44
./download-images.sh --print-path ubuntu2604
./download-images.sh --print-path virtio-win
./download-images.sh --print-path windows11
./download-images.sh --print-path windows11 --iso

The Windows target prints the QCOW2 path by default. Add --iso to print its manually supplied installation ISO path. The QCOW2 is named after the detected ISO (for example Win11_25H2_English_x64_v2.iso → base-qcow2/Win11_25H2_English_x64_v2.qcow2); if no ISO is present, an existing *Win*11*x64*.qcow2 (*Win*11*arm64*.qcow2 on arm64) in base-qcow2/ is used instead.

Download URLs can be overridden with DEBIAN_IMAGE_URL, ALMA_IMAGE_URL, FEDORA_IMAGE_URL, UBUNTU_IMAGE_URL, and VIRTIO_WIN_ISO_URL. Each may list several mirrors of the same file, separated by whitespace; the Fedora image defaults to the TUNA, BFSU and NJU mirrors, and the Ubuntu image to the TUNA, NJU and official cloud-images.ubuntu.com mirrors.

When aria2 is installed (aria2c), an image is downloaded from all of its mirrors at once, with a single connection to each mirror. Without it, curl (or wget) tries the mirrors in order. A partial download is only resumed with the same downloader and mirror list; otherwise it starts over. The Fedora and Ubuntu checksums can be overridden with FEDORA_IMAGE_SHA256 and UBUNTU_IMAGE_SHA256 when using a custom image.