@anthonie
Thanks for the help. Surprisingly, I once again uninstalled it all and reinstalled and it seems to work now. I'm not sure if the image was extracted improperly the first time (same size as the one I just extracted again) or what but now it actually booted up.
I gotta set up an icon theme and all that I guess but so far, so good.

Any update on anybody trying Unity for this yet? Seems like it might be a nice addition.