Freedom Creations

So what’s the best way to set up your computer for web development?  Regardless, you are going to want to have two OSs installed.  Let’s start with the Apple computers.

On a MAC you can install another Intel based OS using Boot Camp or a virtualization product within the MAC OS.  I prefer the latter.

There are many virtualization products for the MAC; some are free and some are paid (I will be going through the different options on a later post).  The most popular used on the MAC is Parallels.  I like VirtualBox which is free (I will be going through the VirtualBox installation on a later post.)  Whatever virtualization product you use the second OS installed, should be Windows XP.  If you have the juice (4GB of RAM) you can install Windows Vista.  Also if you have the capacity you can install Ubuntu too.  That’s the recommended OS setup on the MAC.

On a PC if you have a 80GB or less hard drive, I recommend you install Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) as the main OS and virtualize Windows XP or Vista.  I recommend the latest version of Ubuntu which is 8.04 LTS.  You can find instructions on how to install Ubuntu at Ubuntu and also another great site HowtoForge.

If you have a PC with 120GB or more, you can dual boot into Windows or Ubuntu.  I recommend you also virtualize Windows within Ubuntu.  If you want to test a site in Windows real quick you wouldn’t want to reboot all the way out just to test.

That’s the recommended setup on a PC.  Here are two hints for your OS setups.

HINT 1: When setting a dual boot machine, install Windows first.  At the partition setup step of the Windows installation, create the partition for Windows and leave the rest of the Hard Drive (HD) un-partitioned.  When you install Ubuntu pick the un-partitioned portion of the HD.

HINT 2: When virtualizing an OS you can install it on an external HD.  This way you don’t take away any HD space from your main OS.  Also, if you use the same virtualization product on different machines you can run the virtualized OS on the external HD from those machines.  So, you just have one virtualized OS shared amongst other PCs.  This works great with VirtualBox.  I have not tried this with other virtualization products.