Gentoo under Vista

My current laptop runs 64-bit Vista.  This computer is used by my family for gaming, so there’s not much chance that I’ll be converting it full-time to Linux.  Instead, I decided to use Sun’s VirtualBox to run a Linux development box under Vista.

After much wavering between Ubuntu and Gentoo, I finally settled on the latter.  No particular reason, except maybe that I’m not planning on using much GUI, so Gentoo is a lighter-weight system in that regard.  It is quite possible that I’ll add an Ubuntu system as well, as this is the system my father uses and I would like that software I write may one day end up on his default install.

The installation was pretty straightforward.  After installing VirtualBox through the standard Windows installer, I noticed that VirtualBox has a preset for Gentoo systems.  I used that preset, generated my hard drive image (20 GB virtual drive), then mounted my Gentoo iso.  Boot, no problems so far.

My virtual machine is still installing (hey, Gentoo isn’t exactly a fast installer), but I still have two major to-do items:

• Get VBoxVmService working.  This is a system to allow VirtualBox to run as a Windows service.  Unfortunately, information on VBoxVmService is spread throughout forum threads, and it’s hard to follow; even though I seem to have everything set up correctly (according to the instructions), it’s not working.  Even worse, the logs indicate that everything is working, so troubleshooting is going to be an issue.
• Install the VirtualBox guest additions.  These allow for better interfacing between the host and guest systems.

Once I have everything working, I’m going to take some time to get back into “programmer-mode”, it having been almost five years since I could call myself a professional programmer.