I'm itching to try my hand at Ruby on Rails development. I also do a fair amount of PHP. To those ends, I'd like to have a linux environment I can have permanent access to. I actually successfully turned my laptop into a Win7/Mint machine about a year ago, but foolishly listened to Dell's recommendation to update my BIOS, which killed my bootloader. Oops. I haven't attempted to do it since, but my open source work is increasing, and I need an environment to call my own.
I'm comfortable in setting up a dual boot system, but I wonder if I should even bother when VirtualBox and VMWare are out there.
In lieu of a dedicated *nix machine, what do the rest of you do?
I'm in close to the same boat and plan to look at VMWare Player. Once I build my next machine, I plan to set up an Unbuntu VM and a Windows XP VM to run on top of Windows 7. I don't see the reason to set up a multi-boot system because I'll have enough resources to run them all at the same time if necessary. I want to pick up shell scripting so I can write some tools for work as well as Perl/LWP to build a couple of scrapers to pull data. The Windows VM would be a sandbox to VPN into work. I keep work and play separate, but I'm tired of shlepping downstairs to the laptop. I work better on a desktop, anyway.
I'm in the opposite situation with my MacBook. It's an older 15" MBP (circa 2007), so it has a Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM. If I want to run another OS on top of OSX Lion, it becomes a little sluggish. I ran Windows XP with Parallels for a little while and I wasn't too impressed. In that situation, when I rebuild the machine with an SSD later, I'm going to go the Boot Camp route. I just don't have the horsepower to run both happily.
I'm sure there are other considerations, but in my case it's just a matter of hardware resources. I'm also keen on avoiding the Pain in the Ass Factor (PITAF), and a multi-boot system would be higher on the scale than running VMWare on top of Windows.
Use virtualization unless you absolutely need native performance. It's way more convienent.
With v-TX on your CPU, and enabled in your BIOS, if you're willing to dedicate the system resources to the VM, you can get near-native performance out of a VM. My Linux environment is pretty full featured (KDE, high res x86, etc), and it runs pretty smooth with two cores, 2GB of RAM and video acceleration turned on in VirtualBox.
I run an Ubuntu Server (11.10) install at work in VMware and I'm just running on a Core 2 Duo. I've had no performance issues whatsoever, so I'd say VMware/virtualbox, definitely. Besides, that way you can take "snapshots" of the box, and then if you goof up a config or just want to start over you can do it that way instead of reinstalling.
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I'm in the opposite situation with my MacBook. It's an older 15" MBP (circa 2007), so it has a Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM. If I want to run another OS on top of OSX Lion, it becomes a little sluggish. I ran Windows XP with Parallels for a little while and I wasn't too impressed. In that situation, when I rebuild the machine with an SSD later, I'm going to go the Boot Camp route. I just don't have the horsepower to run both happily.
I'm sure there are other considerations, but in my case it's just a matter of hardware resources. I'm also keen on avoiding the Pain in the Ass Factor (PITAF), and a multi-boot system would be higher on the scale than running VMWare on top of Windows.
My $0.02!
(That being said, I do full RoR dev on my Windows box directly, just FYI. You don't need Linux for that).
With v-TX on your CPU, and enabled in your BIOS, if you're willing to dedicate the system resources to the VM, you can get near-native performance out of a VM. My Linux environment is pretty full featured (KDE, high res x86, etc), and it runs pretty smooth with two cores, 2GB of RAM and video acceleration turned on in VirtualBox.
Intel has a list of processors and whether or not they support it here. All 1st and 2nd generation Core processors do.