My flu has relapsed and gone once more (which makes me suspect some other viral agent...), and I found a little time during that whole process to use a couple of really neat products I had been hearing about for a while but hadn't yet toyed with.
First, VMWare... I've been using virtual server instances using their server product for a while, but the release of VMWare Fusion (to run a bunch of different OS's on a Mac) a few months ago caught my attention on the consumer product side. The VMWare Workstation product allows you to have any number of "virtual computers" - complete with operating systems - on your computer. No reboots. The combinations are virtually (HA!) endless, but I tried setting up just a couple on my XP laptop.
The absolute write-home-about-it, Linux-distro-of-the-year, give-these-guys-a-medal OS I tried was Ubuntu 7.1 Desktop Edition. WOW. Absolutely amazing. Maybe it was the fact that I could get back to my Windows machine insanely fast, or the no-cursor-lagging-like-Virtual-PC performance while I was in the VMWare window, but man was I blown away.
In just a couple of inattentive hours (read: while I was working on something else), I had VMWare downloaded and installed, my Ubuntu partition configured, the Ubuntu ISO downloaded and mapped as a boot CD to my VMWare client's Ubuntu instance, Ubuntu itself installed and set up, and PHP5, PHP5 CLI, MySQL, and Apache 2.2 RUNNING. Not just "got the source downloaded, just need to compile it now so I zzzzzzz...", but fully operational using "sudo apt-get" from the command line / terminal. All that would have been even faster had I downloaded the ISO for an Ubuntu server distribution instead of the consumer-oriented desktop since the former comes standard with LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php) already installed.
On the bells & whistles side, my Ubuntu release came with gEdit (notepad on crack, for you windows users who like to code...), OpenOffice, FireFox, and a ton of nice-to-haves that I will not even think of uninstalling. Heck, I'm thinking of blowing away the parent Windows install to replace it with Ubuntu, then just running my Windows machine as a virtual environment. My Visual Studio 2005 Pro and SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition installs may beg to differ on that, though, so I'm holding off for now.
I'll write more on the Ubuntu story later, but man it is hard to blow me away. With this pairing, though: mission accomplished.
0 comments on VMWare Workstation + Ubuntu Desktop Edition = Awesomeness