Ubuntu Inside

Over the last few days (since 9/24), running Virtual PC 2004 in Windows XP has become vital. Let me try to explain to myself the enormity of what’s happening:

• Running a Linux server virtual machine (VM) in Windows is a poor-man rendition of running BSD ‘under’ Mac OS X. Using a tool like SftpDrive makes me feel less poor and more frugal.
• Running Apache-MySQL-PHP in a Linux VM in Windows allows me to stay in Windows with Visual Studio 2005 and the eclipse IDE (connecting to Linux via SftpDrive) while matching the production conditions of my hosted content. Visual Studio 2005 is my best XML editor (XML includes XSLT and XHTML). Eclipse running PHPEclipse is my best PHP editor.
• Learning how to set up Apache-MySQL-PHP on Linux is a skill more marketable than learning how to do the same on Windows.
• Synchronizing static files between my development VM and my production server with rsync is nothing short of awesome, compared to the choices considered last time.
• SSH tunneling from a Linux VM running in Windows and a “real,” remote Linux box has far more potential than what’s buried under the commercial obligations Microsoft has to offer. An article like “Tunneling MySQL over SSH” has suddenly become relevant to a Windows user!
• Ubuntu Server running Apache-MySQL-PHP as a VM over Virtual PC 2004 takes up about 15MB of RAM by default. IIS (namely the inetinfo.exe process) takes up 10MB of RAM alone. I still can’t get over how many Linux Virtual Machines I can fit into the memory footprint of Microsoft Word!This is a major move away from my former strategy of using ‘popular’ commercial tools (like Dreamweaver). This was done to encourage potential clients to feel confident that the tools in use producing their web sites were ‘approved’ by popular consensus. They had the ability to take over the Web site using these tools. This strategy is years out of date and had an unproductive effect on the development of my own sites. The concept of the Blog application and the photo-sharing Web application (e.g. flickr.com) are redefining what it means to build a Web site.

rasx()