Freedom Creations

Posts Tagged ‘MAC’

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Which Operating System (OS) do you go with? Well, I am not going to argue which is best. Each one has its advantages. Our main concern is web design, so I am just going to focus on the features that each OS has to offer in that respect.

Windows 2000/XP/Vista – With Windows you can pretty much run any of the web development tools that are out there; free and non-free. All the major browsers are supported on Windows, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and lately Safari. Also all the cross-platform plug-ins are supported, like Flash, Java, and now Silverlight. Although you can run Apache/MySQL/PHP on a Windows machine, it is not the greatest experience. So when it comes to developing Content Management Services (CMS), I do not recommend doing it on Windows.

MAC OS – On the MAC you can pretty much run a lot of free web design tools and it supports all the major retail applications. All the major browsers are supported except for Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. There is an IE version for the MAC but it only goes up to version 5.2.3 and it is a horrible browser. I do not recommend installing on a MAC as a matter of fact I would remove it if you have it. There is an open source project called IES4OSX (requires WINE) that will allow you to run more recent versions of IE on your MAC but it’s not 100% full-proof. MAC supports all multimedia and programming platforms including Silverlight. MAC has also good support for Apache/MySQL/PHP; therefore a good platform for CMS development. Read the rest of this entry »

Before we can get into the nitty-gritty of web design we should start with the hardware.

Doing web design in of itself does not require any heavy duty hardware. Really, all you need is just a text editor. What computer can’t run a text editor? But, let’s get real. There are other things you have to do that are more demanding, for instance edit pictures.

Although there are many choices to make here, I am just going to list the minimum requirements your computer should have to get started and later I’ll list my personal choice.

• Desktop or Laptop (they both have their benefits).
• MAC or PC (no religion wars here please).
• For a MAC get an Intel based processor.
• For a PC, a Pentium 4 class or above or an AMD Athlon class or above will do.
• 512Mb of RAM; for a MAC 1GB.
• 60Gb or more of hard-drive space is sufficient.
• Screen size is up to you; although I would say a supported resolution for a standard display of 1280×1024 and 1280×800 for a wide screen is good.
• The rest of the hardware components are optional and totally up to your needs and budget.