On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 19:20 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, Gentoo. > > A friend of mine recently suggested I should install and play with > virtual machines on my Gentoo. > > I've scanned /usr/portage for likely looking packages, particularly in > directory "virtual", yet found nothing likely looking. > > Would somebody please give me some hints which packages I should be > looking at, and perhaps any use flags I might need.
They would be under app-emulation. The "virtual" category is for virtual packages (e.g. virtual/editor). You could research Google for Linux visualization. The big 3 open source/semi-open-source are kvm, VirtualBox, and xen. I have personal experience with xen and kvm... and pretty much only use kvm now. The big closed source one is VMware, but, except for legacy requirements, I personally don't know why people (still) use that when the competing open source solutions are typically as good or better than VMWare. As for what USE flags, that would wildly depend on the visualization package you choose (and a billion other ifs). As always, required dependencies are required by the packages themselves, forced USE flags are forced by the packages themselves, anything else is our own personal choice.
