As part of a larger fun project I’m working on (OVS for the ALIX platform; more to come on that once I have it 100% working), I have been playing a lot with OVS.  It’s a great platform, and as others have mentioned, it’s as close to an SDN reference data plane implementation as we have.  I’d be surprised if many if not all commercial implementations of OpenFlow aren’t based on OVS.  Anyway, I wanted to build debian packages since I’d never done it before and thought it’d be fun.  I wanted to use OVS2 so that I can play with some of the newer features and specifically to see how well the IPv6 support is in 2.0 when paired with OpenDaylight(more to come on this, too. I promise =). This proved to be more simple than I anticipated mostly due to lots of good documentation.  To accomplish it, I decided to start with a VM since I lie to work in virtualized environments for experimentation and lambing. I spun up a Debian 7 VM from scratch and began configuring it as I usually do with the inclusion of the tools necessary to build packages. _** I originally tried this from the git repo via _git clone git://openvswitch.org/openvswitch but kept seeing weird errors so I moved to the 2.0.0 tarball.  ``` apt-get -y install screen sudo vim etckeeper mlocate autoconf2.13
libssl-dev graphviz python-all python-qt4 python-zopeinterface
python-twisted-conch tcpdump build-essential fakeroot debhelper
gdebi-core pkg-config

wget [http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-2.0.0.tar.gz](http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-2.0.0.tar.gz)
``````
mv openvswitch-2.0.0.tar.gz openvswitch-2.0.0.orig.tar.gz
``````
cd openvswitch-2.0.0
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dpkg-buildpackage -b
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cd ../

Install all of the packages ( # Answer Y to all prompts )``` gdebi openvswitch-datapath-source_2.0.0-1_all.deb

You should now be able to check the version:  ```
buraglio@deb7ovs-vm:/home/buraglio# ovs-vsctl -V
ovs-vsctl (Open vSwitch) 2.0.0
Compiled Nov 29 2013 13:18:32

Check the OpenFlow versions supported:``` buraglio@deb7ovs-vm:/home/buraglio# ovs-ofctl -V ovs-ofctl (Open vSwitch) 2.0.0 Compiled Nov 29 2013 13:18:32 OpenFlow versions 0x1:0x4

```More to come on this.  For anyone that doesn’t want to build the .debs themselves, they’re available to download from here, no warranty implied or expressed =)