If, like me you spend a lot of time on SourceForge and wish you could harness the SF functionality in your own development environment then this is for you. SourceForge has released SourceForge Enterprise Edition 4.3.

This is a VMWare Virtual Appliance that allows for up to 15 free users. I haven’t put it to use yet, but I will be implementing a test of it (hopefully) sometime this summer at work to see how well it meets our development, project and bug-tracking needs.

If it is all it promises to be this may be one of the most useful tools for small-team distributed development ever.

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For those who are unaware, VMWare offers the free VMWare player. It’s an ok way to bridge the gap between not having any virtualization and a full-blown VMWare Workstation. There are only a limited number of pre-built Virtual Machines for VMWare player from the VMWare site, however.

There are instructions online on how to install a new OS in VMWare Player, but of course that means that you can’t install VMWare Tools.

The better solution (for the short term) is to allow those who have a full VMWare Workstation installed to create virtual machines for use in the player. Riding to the rescue on this front is vmwarez.com – a site that offers prebuilt virtual machines of Open Source OSes for use in VMWare Player. And I see that there are finally some community built machines showing up on the VMWare site now, as well.

I would, however, still recommend getting VMWare Workstation as soon as you can. It is more than worth it!

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Well, I tried the gtk+ based graphical installer on a VMWare virtual machine. I am sad to say it failed painfully – and did so after many hours of emerging and compiling. Part of the problem was in the fact that I had selected to install enlightenment, fluxbox and blackbox (to play around with some different wm’s I hadn’t messed with previously) and the installer chose to install those and gnome and kde. Needless to say, it was many hours to go. Thankfully (?) after about 4 hours the installer failed on some ebuild or other (I don’t recall what it was right now) and that was that.

I tried it again. With the exact same results. The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So, now I have a working VMWare install of Gentoo 2006.0 using the minimal install disk and am building enlightenment, fluxbox and blackbox the “older fashioned” Gentoo way – via a simple emerge call.

Final score: VMWare: 2, Gentoo Graphical Installer: 0, Gentoo minimal installer: The winner by default.

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Gentoo have finally released a version with a graphical installer: 2006.0. The gui uses gtk+ and is available on the x86 Live CD .

I haven’t had a chance to play around with it yet, but I can tell you that it has reduced the installation instructions by what seems to be more than half! All you gui installer fans: here you go!

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