The Dataverse team at Harvard has much more experience with RHEL/CentOS than Debian and Ubuntu but there is demand for supporting installation on these platforms, most recently at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/dataverse-community/3xqr8c_DFso/kT37maVD9E4J
This would be a great opportunity for contribution from members of the community who are familiar with Debian or Ubuntu.
Let's get it working in Vagrant first.
@lwo this is the issue I was telling you about and you're right that "Here be dragons!" if you run export OPERATING_SYSTEM=debian before you run vagrant up. Don't let that scare you, though! Please feel free to send us a pull request, even with the Puppet stuff we talked about at the community meeting! :)
For my part I run Ubuntu at home and my dev environment works fine. @abidart even documented Ubuntu from a dev perspective at http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4.0/developers/ubuntu.html
Sir @pdurbin: I'll begin forging a module once I get a go head.
Ubuntu and Debian are supported by the community in the form of these Puppet and Ansible repos by
In my pull request at #2895 I gave shout outs to these two projects: http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4.2.4/installation/prep.html#advanced-installation
Both repos support Vagrant, which is great.
This is a strategic decision that may consume more resources, particularly support. We would direct users of the puppet and ansible config solutions to their respective repositories for support and would only be able to offer best effort on supporting operational issues in those environments.
@oscardssmith this is the issue I was telling you about today if you'd like to try to get the Vagrant environment to work when you set the environment variable OPERATING_SYSTEM to debian: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/blob/v4.6.2/Vagrantfile#L23
I'm assigning it to you but if after you take a look you decide you aren't interested, you can just unassign yourself.
If anyone wants to work on this, please get in touch. For now, see the community efforts I mentioned at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/1059#issuecomment-176512779 . Closing.
What's this! A DM from @4tikhonov with a link to a doc called Running Dataverse repository on Kubernetes installed and deployed on Ubuntu 18.04 with local storage".
Want. Sold. Reopening.
Links or it didn't happen, @4tikhonov
@janetm once Dataverse Installation Personas are fully operational, we'll know who's running Ubuntu, Debian etc. https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse-installations/issues/16

Beware, the Glassfish container images sill use CentOS 7.
Payara Flavor is running on Debian.
@pdurbin, we're going to discuss it with @poikilotherm today as I need to clean up some things and the local storage definition requires own YAML specifications in the master branch.
My colleagues will try to install Dataverse on CentOS as well this week following the same guide.