It can be a real pain getting everything together, especially when upgrading software, or moving around. Today I am faced with this problem. My old development environment is dead; I have one day to get a new environment running and do some useful work. I’d also like to catch up with a friend for coffee, so I’ve got to be smoking.
I have a 1Gb key, my goal is to install a software environment here that will be easily transferable. I also want to make this process as easy as possible to replicate - you never know when you’ll need to expand the team.
VMware + DSL (Damn Small Linux)
VMware player is a free product from VMware, there are several limitations; you can’t create images. But you can run them. To install my dev environment you will need vmware player. I have downloaded and installed this on the local machine, this will need to be replicated on other machines I use, so I have kept the installer on my USB stick. Unfortunately, VMware will need to be installed directly on the machine.
DSL is an uber-small linux installation, that I won’t have to wait forever to install. It is based on the Debian distribution. I found a fellow blogger explaining how to create VMware images, DSL also explains the creation of DSL in VMware. Unfortunately no pre-made images, so I downloaded the DSL iso as well. When I booted up the VMware player, using a created vmx file, it complained that there wasn’t enough disk space on my 1Gb USB drive to create 2Gb files, this seems reasonable. So I will have to store my image on the local machine.
Some of the DSL download sites provide a VMX release, I found this one provided good download speeds. There are several applications of this type available from VMware for the VMware player, though I opted to build my own using the DSL release.
The proFTPd that runs on this release is a waste of time. Shutdown ProFTPd and start betaFTPd from the fluxbox menu. It is much more responsive in this particular install.
Eclipse PDT + Subclipse
This also gave me some headaches. Subclipse seems to integrate well, but the PDT build doesn’t seem to be rendering PHP… I’m not sure why.
2 Comments
I been looking at colinux, its can be install without a virtual environment and can be run along side other os.
I don’t really get it - it’s running a coLinux kernel in a Windows machine? I guess cool if you wanted an alternative to cygwin.
I’m really looking at vmWare solutions so I can distribute the development environment online. So I want to set it up once and distribute it as openly as possible.