Wednesday, November 07, 2007

My Mac becomes a VMWare host

As promised, I'm moving away from Mac as my primary working environment. I need Java 6, it doesn't have the best integration with the AMP stack, which I need to work with right now, and so on.

But I'm not fully giving up on Mac OSX. It is now my hosting environment for VMWare Fusion. I am typing this blog in fullscreen mode in Ubuntu under VMWare. I am realizing that for many a computer could easily turn from a single computer to a hosting environment for many computers. This is especially useful for developers, because it gives you flexibility, freedom, and the ability to easily test on many platforms. A real wave of the future.

I installed Indiana, and I am working on installing Solaris Express Developer Edition. I'd like to work with Solaris - I like ZFS and I remember how blazingly fast Solaris is, particularly with disk I/O. Indiana had an incredibly nice install experience, it's actually hard to believe after previous experiences with the Solaris installation. This is just an amazing, amazing improvement and the team deserves very high accolades.

However, Indiana doesn't have things fully integrated yet (it's missing Java, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and so on). I tried using the new package management system but nothing seemed to be available. I'm going to keep working on getting this set up, but I'm not quite ready to dedicate my day-to-day working life under Indiana. Indiana looks very promising and I think ultimately that's where I'm going to end up.

Next up is Solaris Express Developer Edition. I've heard the install is also vastly improved, and it has a lot more things integrated, including NetBeans. So I'll let you know how that goes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you use OpenSolaris and get the additional packages you need from Blastwave?

Unknown said...

Yes, I think you probably can, but it's a bummer, I had hoped I could try out the new packaging system.

I also know that there are optimized versions of the AMP stack available at
this Cool Stack web site
- I might try that out.