Ubuntu in VMWare
I have been working on my boss for a while trying to get a macbook. I knew the answer would be no, but I had to at least try. My boss was totally supportive, but I was shot down by IT. So, no macbook for me until I pony up the cash to buy it myself.
The reason I was requesting a macbook is because developing on my windows laptop just doesn’t work well. My production environment is debian/rails/mysql/apache so I would ideally like to replicate that as closely as possible on my development machine.
I have spent huge amounts of time trying to get Ubuntu working on my laptop, but it just doesn’t do well. Power management never quite works right. Wireless is always just a tad better than shakey. Docking/Undocking wreaks havoc on my dual monitor setup. It just doesn’t work.
In windows, my hardware support is basically perfect. Everything just works. However, getting things like ImageMagick and Rmagick working in windows is non-trivial. There are a significant number of other libraries that I use in my web apps that just are not well supported on windows. Oh, and it is slow. Terribly, terribly slow. I know this is caused by the corporate image that I have to use, but the end result is that it is terribly slow.
Macbook, enter stage right. Getting all of the software that I need to develop and serve my webapps set up took about 4 hours on my Mac at home. It just works. And the macbooks are blazingly fast. And Pretty. It would have been a truely ideal solution. But works says “No macbook for you!”
What is a developer to do?
VMWare Server, enter stage left. It is free. It allows me to run Ubuntu on my laptop, and let windows deal with all of the hardware issues. It is surprising fast and usable. If it does not have X running, it is actually quite fast. Because of how much faster my laptop is than my production server, even running through VMWare I wouldn’t be surprised if response times were faster.
So, this is my solution for now. At some point this fall I am going to buy a macbook for personal use. I think I am just going to bring it to work and use it here as well, but for now I have something usable.