We're working on doing a Gentoo-based developer's image in VMWare. This will follow the pattern I used in updating my laptop, i.e. update the Gentoo OS to include the dependencies for Sugar and then build Sugar itself on that "stable" substrate.

This is going to be a full Gentoo install, including X, Gnome and the rest. The idea is that you'll be able to download and run the image on any of OSX, Linux or Win32. If you want to go bleeding edge (mainly for those wanting to work on Sugar itself) you can just keep updating using regular Gentoo mechanisms.

We'll probably also look at having a machine somewhere to which you can "slave" your virtual machine in order to get the latest stable builds for normal development. If I get time I'll also look at creating an emerge for Sugar itself so that the images would be able to pull a binary package for the Sugar build.

Have to get reports started for the sprint as well, including the key missing idea for the non-Gentoo systems "Don't try to upgrade your OS, it probably doesn't have any way to get close enough to the 'bleeding edge' to get Sugar running, instead, have Sugar build the 'base' package, which builds a parallel set of libraries on top of your stable OS".

I'm in the airport all day today, using the pay wireless access ($10/day). I've got 8 hours or so left before the plane leaves, a bit of work to do for clients in the meantime. I'll start the Gentoo image updating in the background (have to fix the VMWare networking (can't bridge to a wireless driver, have to use NAT) to get that started).

[Update 10:52] Still no luck on the networking, NAT is set up, but I can't get the interface in the guest OS to actually see the network, dhcp isn't responding and manual configurations result in "network unavailable" responses. Continuing to hack on it, though I'll have to switch to real work soon.

[Update 11:44] Doesn't look like I'm going to get it working. Really should have someone who's a sysadmin doing this stuff I suppose. Oh well, guess I'll wait until I'm at home and can plug it into a wired ethernet overnight. Will have to solve the problem before we hand out the images, though (it should work on Win32 with most/all drivers, but Linux and OSX... who knows).