Developing in a Virtual Machine

Ok, so right now there is an extreme shortage of actual Raspberry Pi computers. Thankfully, to help me get started on my journey regardless, there is a virtual machine which can be used to start developing for Raspberry Pi (This is different and distinct from a Raspberry Pi virtual machine, which does not exist to my knowledge).

2012-01-22 Since the initial writing, there has been a new virtual machine released, which streamlines some of this. This post has been updated to reflect these changes.

First, you'll need to download and install VirtualBox, a free VM environment (as of this writing version 4.1.8 is the latest).
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads


After you've installed VirtualBox, you will want to download the VirtualBox extensions.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html#extpack


Then, you'll need a copy of the Raspberry Pi virtual machine. The developer who has created the VM has put a torrent to the VM here (it's 1.9 gigabytes, so local hosting is... tricky).
http://russelldavis.org/2012/01/20/new-raspberry-pi-development-vm-v0-2/

Don't have a torrent client? This one seems to be a good mix of usability and low-invasiveness:
http://www.bittorrent.com/downloads/complete?os=win

Once you have VirtualBox installed, open the zip and put the VM image (RaspberryPi-Development-v0.2.ova) somewhere convenient. You should be able to just double-click the ova file to get the VM imported.

Start the VM, click the Raspberry Pi Developer account, and login with a password of:  
password

 Poof, before you know it: A Raspberry Pi dev environment running in a VM.

 Next up, compiling and running "Hello world".