VirtualBox on Headless Gentoo

Being an adherent of Continuous Integration, I need a build machine that runs round the clock even when my workstation is turned off. As I’m running a small home server, this wouldn’t be an issue — if it weren’t for the fact that my home server runs Linux and 99% of my development happens in Windows. So I use virtualization to run a small Windows system on top of my home server.

In the past I used VMware for this job. VMware worked well for me and performance was quite good, but now that I’ve switched to a fully headless system, I noticed that the vmware-server package pulls in most of the X11 libraries – which I’m not particularly keen on having on my system due to their compile times.

A cube mounted like a display showing the Sun logo

So I went shopping for some alternatives. KVM sounded interesting (and was the leanest virtualization solution I could find), but the Gentoo Wiki stated that Windows didn’t work in qemu with recent kernels, so I went looking on – and found VirtualBox. This article explains how to set up VirtualBox on a headless Gentoo system.

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