Hi Brad,
You may have heard about it already:
Instantiations have implemented their own logging framework based on the design of log4j. It's called log4s and can be downloaded from VASTGoodies.
But nevertheless I think there's space for alternatives: maybe your framework has some strengths that lack in log4s, like being lightweight or higher performance or an extremely easy to use API. So having it in VASTGoodies sure is a good thing. I am afraid, however, that there is not really an alternative to installing VAST on a machine. To my knowledge, the only way of uploading code to VASTGoodies is using the vastgoodies tools from within the environment.
As to how long it takes to install vast on a linux machine: What does take you several hours? You don't even have to install a full library manager environment, because you can always access the library directly from an image in single-user mode. To use this, you can extract the manager.dat from the installation zip file and put it somewhere on your machine.
You may also be interested in a little how-to on installing the library manager on a Linux machine without using the grapphical installation tool:
http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/a-minimal-va-smalltalk-library-server-on-opensuse-11-2/Regards,
Joachim