Just as I was finishing my review of the beta version of Zend Server CE, Zend proudly announced the release of Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition (CE). So I had to start all over again with a fresh installation of Zend Server CE 4.0.1. I was pleased to see that they fixed some of the quirks and bugs I had encountered in the beta version, but oddly enough they introduced some new ones too. Read more…
Virtualization is a hot topic in ICT. How can you put this to use at home and more specifically on your Mac ? You can use it to run Windows on your Mac, but also to try out different flavors of Linux or to run a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) development server. If you have a spare recent pc you can install a baremetal hypervisor like XenServer5, but that’s a different story. If you want to install a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor on your MacBook, Mac mini or iMac, there are a number of solutions available. To name a few: VMWare, Parallels, Q and VirtualBox.
First requirement: it has to be free, free as in made freely available by the software vendor, not as in a pirated or illegal copy. So skip VMWare (unless you stick with the VMWare Player) and Parallels.
Second requirement: it must be a hypervisor project, preferably open source, with active development, user groups, forums and good documentation.
So I chose VirtualBox. For the cross-platformers among you, like myself, VirtualBox also runs on Windows, Linux and OpenSolaris and supports a large number of guest operating systems including Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris, OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
But this post will be about installing a virtual Ubuntu LAMP or web server on Mac OS X using VirtualBox. Read more…
