Lone Coder: VirtualBox on Vista with a Gentoo Guest

[Jamon Camisso]

Ken Burtch wrote:
>>  Huh ???  It took me a few days the first time, way back when, in the
>> days of stage 1 installs (the hard way), on a 400 mhz PII, whilst asking
>> questions, and waiting for replies on the Gentoo mailing list.  With
>> stage 3 installs being the preferred method, no way does it take a week.
>> I don't understand what is so hard about it.  And why were you looking
>> up commands on Google when the Gentoo installation docs walk you through
>> the process?
>>
>>  Gentoo (actually the current version of xorg-server) does *NOT*
>> require an xorg.conf.  It's only required for weird setups.
> 
> Thank you, Walter, for your feedback.
> 
> In regards to your statements, if Fedora installs 20 packages and you
> argue that if you only install 10 on Gentoo that you can setup Gentoo
> just as fast, I think that proves my point that Gentoo is a slower
> install.  Not installing packages would certainly reduce the time of an 
> install, and would reduce the number of files Gentoo requires you to 
> configure by hand.
> 
> Following the Gentoo docs would absolutely lead to a failed installation 
> on VirtualBox, as the installation process is not identical to a bare 
> metal install.

Failed in terms of your expectations of a bootable linux with a console 
or with full Xorg? I'm guessing the latter, but for some all that is 
needed is a working console and login.

> As Gentoo doesn't come with an xorg.conf file--except the sample one 
> provided with the software and that doesn't support VirtualBox--and X 
> Windows cannot not run without an xorg.conf file, and Gnome and KDE 
> require X to run, I find it unlikely that you can get a graphical 
> desktop in VirtualBox without creating and configuring the X config file.

There are tools for doing that too, xorgconfig and xorgcfg (tui, gui 
respectively). But, and I'll get to this in a second, doing things 
manually up front doesn't hurt in the long term.

> To get what I considered a full install of Gentoo on VirtualBox took me 
> a week.  To install the same on Fedora took an hour.  Hopefully, my 
> article will cut through a lot of the difficulties and will make the 
> install go a little faster, since I gathered a lot of information from 
> different sources into one place.

Now you have a working gentoo install. You won't have to reinstall it 
every time there's a new release. The amount of time you've just saved 
isn't quantifiable up front, but think of all the backups and clean 
installs you won't have to do versus upgrading in place between Fedora 
releases (which I've never had very good success with, resulting in more 
time spent fixing the botched upgrade than just doing a new install and 
copying backups over).

> Based on experience, the cost of installing Gentoo on VirtualBox was 
> signficantly higher that installing Fedora, especially when Fedora 
> supports VirtualBox right "out of the box" and Gentoo does not.

If speaking about costs, as you've discovered there can be time costs up 
front. But now you know how the system works, don't have to do it again, 
and have an article to show for it. Not bad in my estimation.

Now that you've seen there are different ways to get Gentoo setup, try 
debootstrap and build a Debian system that way. My guess is that you 
won't be so put off by Gentoo's method :) That said, I pretty much only 
use debootstrap for new installs since it is so easy once you get the 
hang of it. The best part is that Fedora, Gentoo and others all include 
it so I can Debianize practically any system. Sweet!

Jamon
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