Question: Long story short, I am trying to find a pre-made Linux development environment for VirtualBox so I don't have to worry about installing a distro, getting all packages installed, and so forth, since last time I did that it took me a full day to get something that remotely did what I wanted.

I've got a few semi-weird requirements, which doesn't help...

* Preferably SSH only, no slick GUI etc installed, as the laptop host is not endowed with a lot of HD space or RAM. (Which is also why I cannot dual boot, so please do not suggest that option.) I intend to do pretty much all using PuTTy, as it is a workflow I'm already accustomed to.
* Basic gcc, automake etc are all I need.

I really don't care about the distro itself, or the packaging system, or anything else really. I just want to download it, set up some mounts, and be ready to go.

If such a thing doesn't exist, I'd still appreciate suggestions of the best distro to use that will get me to my requirements fastest without a lot of tweaking.

Answer: 
Turnkey linux has a number of preconfigured server images that will work in virtualbox

<http://www.turnkeylinux.org/>

<http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/installation-appliances-virtualbox>
You can try [virtualboximages.com](http://virtualboximages.com/) - they have plenty of distros, but they charge a token sum ($.99-3.99) per download - which, i assume, goes to cover their bandwidth costs.