User blog comment:Thepeopleseason/Vagrant install of HabitRPG now available/@comment-24244390-20140518175139/@comment-24244390-20140521014436

Yes, that definitely made a big difference. `vagrant up` worked, and it did a bunch of downloading and installing. When I tried running `npm start` on the VM, I got a different error. See https://gist.github.com/octern/7f5fbb7f53614fed1258