Since most VM's I found on the interweb are quite outdated I pieced together an up-to-date Debian Wheezy VM which includes everything you'll need to manage your Pi or develop applications. The desktop environment used is Trinity (TDE) which is a fork of KDE3 so it has most features you might expect from a modern desktop while not slowing you down.
The applications included in the VM are geared towards both (first time) end-users and bigtime developers. End-users will find all they need on the dock and in the application menu. Included are GUI applications to simplify managing your SDcards, remote management, file sharing and opening all those strange file types all these Linux geeks throw at you.
Developers can find some toys in the home folder, on the commandline you should find an abundance of tools for (cross-)compiling, rpi virtualization, creating custom OS images, package creation/maintainance and distribution. Also you'll find some wrapper scripts which wrap long and difficult commands in a simple short command to save you some time.
PiStudio is not aiming to be a super tweaked Pi developers OS but a simple turn-key solution for end-users and a solid base for developers to which you can add your desired IDE and tools.
PiStudio is distributed in the Open Virtualization Format, this means you can use it on any operating system that can run a virtualization hosts which supports importing .ova (v1.0) files (VirtualBox, VMware, Parallels, etc..) If you experience any problems with your VM software I sugest you try VirtualBox (v 4.3.10) since that's what I've used to build and export the VM and it's free and open source. To enable USB support on Vbox you will need to add the https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads">Extension Pack to your Vbox installation.
