Just to chime in here but I've been using Crunchbang lately too and find it a nice choice. I've wanted something stable and lighter that I use as my "desktop/host" and then do all my dev work in Virtualbox or KVM vms.
FYI, the latest ISO now uses SLim instead of GDM.
Thanks for sharing about rcconf. I'd never heard of that Debian tool before.
By the way, is your emulator VirtualBox by any chance? If so, is there any extra work to get the Linux into full-screen (aside from having to install VirtualBox Guest Tools)?
I've been using Parallels for Mac (last year's version). If you just bump up the video RAM to like 8MB you'll get more options for display sizes. I'll upgrade to version 7 ... just haven't had the time lately.
Will definitely give it a try!