Rich Waters

I found myself needing to get a decent development environment set up at home and figured I’d take a look at setting up a few Virtual Machines as I’ve played with them a tad in the past and figure they can be extremely useful for managing various types of development environments.

The first server I wanted to get up and running is LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP). For Demo’s I’ve used Xampp on Win boxes as it’s really easy to get up and running. I wanted the flexibility to start and stop the entire server and have multiple versions configured differently for separate projects, so I figured VM would be the better way to go. After a bit of searching I ran across a couple different pre-configured VM images: Grandma’s Lamp and rPath LAMP Appliance. Grandma’s Lamp was based on Xubuntu, rPath appears to be it’s own stripped down distro (or at least I couldn’t figure out what it’s derived from). The latest version I could find for Grandma’s Lamp was nearing two years old so I opted to go with the rPath appliance as it was updated earlier this month.

They offer a crazy variety of ways to get the appliance up and running – vmware, xen, cd image, amazon machine image, MS VHD… Since I did’t have any dedicated hardware ready to go I grabbed the version for VMware Player and it loaded up like a charm. The web interface was pretty slick, and even uses a touch of Mochikit for effects/ajax functionality.

Next up, Rails w/Mongrel cluster, then I expect I’ll follow in Tim’s footsteps (hopefully with better luck) and try to set up Domino in a VM.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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