Lone Coder: VirtualBox on Vista with a Gentoo Guest

[Jamon Camisso]

Ken Burtch wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-10-17 at 20:55 -0400, Rajinder Yadav wrote:
>> Ken Burtch wrote:
>>> My latest Lone Coder column, very long and technical:
>>>
>>> "Regardless if you think Gentoo is genius or madness, a manual install
>>> represents the ultimate challenge to boot Linux on VirtualBox.
>>>
>>> This document assumes you have a basic understanding of setting up a
>>> Linux computer, such as how to build a kernel and how to format a disk
>>> partition. "Host" refers to the operating system running VirtualBox, in
>>> this case, Windows Vista. "Guest" refers to the operating system running
>>> within VirtualBox, in this case, Gentoo Linux. I use "gentoo #" as a
>>> root Gentoo prompt but your actual prompt may be a different one...."
>>>
>>> http://www.pegasoft.ca/coder/coder_october_2009.html
>>>
>> Hi Ken,
>>
>> this is a well written article, excellent work.
>>
>> Question, about when you say "manual install represents the ultimate challenge 
>> to boot Linux on VirtualBox."Is it really that challenging?
> 
> As I wrote at the end of the article, it took an hour to install Fedora
> and OpenSolaris.  And it took a week to install Gentoo, looking up the
> right commands and settings through Google,  So, on that basis, the
> Gentoo install was 35 times longer and more complicated, and 35 times
> the cost.

The question was would a bare metal install have taken longer or would 
it have been about the same time? e.g. is there something specific about 
VirtualBox that requires more work.

>> I've used VMWare and installed many distro on my WinXP, with custom partition, 
>> the process was relative effortless and quick.
>>
>> So is it Gentoo that's involved to install or does VirtualBox makes it so, or do 
>> you just like to command line it like a guru =) ... I compared the steps to 
>> install Ubuntu and Debain, and I never had to drop into the shell to type stuff 
>> to install Linux, ever, not even with Slackware.
> 
> Because of its nature, Gentoo has no installer or setup program.
> There's no alternative except to use the shell and to use commands like
> "fdisk" that I haven't otherwise needed to use in years.

They have an installer and have had for some time. A number of their 
releases have a livecd that do all the work for you. No fdisk needed.

Jamon
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