Virtualbox Gentoo Guests for Linux and Windows.

ycUygB1 · Last edited by ycUygB1 on Wed Apr 13, 2016 1:04 am; edited 27 times in total

This is an update as of March 26, 2016.

If you want to quickly spin up a Gentoo VirtualBox x86 guest under Windows, or an amd64 guest under linux, here are virtual disk images that are ready to go. If the vdi file resides on a btrfs filesystem, you must mount that disk with the nodatacow option. This is a little-known problem with VirtualBox and btrfs.

I hope it will save you some time. These are Gentoo guests with complete MATE desktop environments, pulseaudio, flash, and CD support. I have used mate-1.12 from the mate-de-gentoo overlay.

There are two users: larry and root. The password is gentoo.

Comments are welcome.

Instructions:

1. On your host computer, download VirtualBox and VirtualBox Extension Pack. I used VirtualBox 5.0.16.

2. If you wish, enable virtualization in your BIOS. The Gentoo image supplied here supports multiple cpus, although it will work with just one cpu.

3. Download the compressed disk image:

For Windows Hosts: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q8i9r7dqgfw5xs4/Gentoo.zip?dl=0 (1.2 GB)
For Linux Hosts : https://www.dropbox.com/s/knp5u2iv18xgu5r/Gentoo.vdi.xz?dl=0 (1.1 GB)

4. Verify the downloaded file.

hagar-dunor · n00b Joined: 26 Apr 2012 Posts: 39

Hi, maybe it would be worth to merge topics ? https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-964410.html

One comment : your virtual drive looks huge, have you tried to fill your partitions with zeros before compressing ?

For each partition :

ycUygB1 · Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 4:29 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your tip about zeroing out unused space. Now the zip file is half of what it was before.

Regarding merging, I'll leave that up to the moderators.

hagar-dunor · n00b Joined: 26 Apr 2012 Posts: 39

Still seems too fat. A full gnome virtual image should weight between 700 and 800 MB. Some additional tips I use for my virtual image :

-Wipe /usr/portage/distfiles
-"make clean" in /usr/src/linux
-Don't forget to zero unused space on /boot partition if it's a partition on it's own, same for swap if it happened to be used.

About thread merging, I was thinking of something that we should initiate, a common thread to host all gentoo virtual images in one place. But it's just an idea.

ycUygB1 · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2013 9:28 am Post subject:

Thanks again for your pointers. Now the zip file is 1.05 GB and the VDI file is 8 GB. A few useful commands follow, mostly for my own reference. Users shouldn't need these commands:

Sometimes VirtualBox will refuse to mount the vdi file if it has previously encountered another vdi with the same identifier.

ycUygB1 · Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2014 4:31 pm Post subject:

Update for 2014. See original post.

ycUygB1 · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 4:35 pm Post subject:

Update to include an image for Linux hosts. This is useful if you quickly want a fresh Gentoo environment for testing and lxc won't cut it.

ycUygB1 · Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2016 4:53 pm Post subject:

Update for 2016. See original post.

electroman90 · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2016 Posts: 3

I'm using your build for Linux hosts on my CentOS machine at work. I was going to set up Gentoo in VBox myself right before finding this and it seems to be put together quite nicely. Thanks.

ycUygB1 · Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2016 9:51 pm Post subject:

Thanks. Let me know if you have any feedback.