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Gentoo on VirtualBox on Mac

In one of my previous posts I expressed my excitement about VirtualBox beta 3 working well on Leopard. I benchmarked VirtualBox and found out that the guest OS runs almost at the native speed. This is very exciting. It simply means I can install Gentoo instead of Ubuntu or knoppix. It is not like I have anything against those distros. They are really good and get things done pretty fast. But I got used to Gentoo and learned so much about it that I know where to look for when something fails or if I wanted to install a package or hack something up quickly. I did not want to learn another distro from the basics. Anyway I created a new VM for Gentoo mounted the minimal install cd and launched the VM. Everything worked perfectly. I just followed the regular gentoo install procedure and I have a system up and running in about the same time as it would take for me to install on a native platform.

I later installed kde and firefox. To start off working on my Freevo 2.0 project I downloaded the code from svn repo. Everything looks promising. I even tried some opengl. So glxgears gave me about 1000 fps on my 2.33 GHz dual core intel mac book pro. Not bad huh? I installed all the dependency packages (libxml, imlib2, python 2.5, librsvg, pylibsvg and such) and compiled evas. Then I installed kaa fired up my Freevo 2 project that I started a few months ago but never finished to conclusion. It works! I have a video of the project in youtube here. It was incomplete at that time. Hopefully now I can work on it a little bit. More updates will come soon...

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