A large obstacle to getting people involved with Firefox Developer Tools (and Firefox development in general) is the development environment. As a first step in helping them I have created a VirtualBox VM that is preconfigured for JS and C++ development using Eclipse. If we can find a public place for the 3.8G VM to live I can blog about it and see if we can get people involved.

I've been attempting to use Vagrant to create a dev environment VM in which the initial downlaod is only ~700MB (then it grabs all the remaining dependencies after being set up locally). I think that's a more workable scheme, but I've been stymied by not being able to use Ubuntu 10.04, while the 11.whatever image does not appear to set up correctly.

Is this a dupe of bug 616089?

bug 616089 is far more ambitious and is something that would make it far easier to contribute. This bug is simply to have a Ubuntu VM ready for use.

Maintaining a VM like this is simply not worth the effort.