My Development Machine

I thought it might be interesting to describe the setup of my current primary development machine. The hardware is a bit dated, but it "works".

I've got Ubuntu 7.04 loaded on a Dell D810 with a 1.8GHz Pentium M and 2GB of PC4200 RAM and a 120GB drive. On top of Ubuntu, I've loaded Beryl so I've got all the cool eye candy.

Much of my development and testing needs Windows, so I installed VMWare Server v1.04. I have VMs for XP, 2000, and even Win98. The VMWare works pretty well, but having used a similar setup on a dual core machine, the extra core REALLY pays off when using virtualization. My single drive spindle also slows things down occasionally.

I'm using Mercurial for an SCM, so I host all my repositories directly on my notebook's hard drive. Yes, I'm backing up regularly. I have an SMB share set up on the main repository directory, so I'm able to mount a network drive from my various Windows VM's in order to branch/merge etc.

I looked high and low for an exceptionally powerful editor to use for my source editing, and ended up with vim on linux, and EditPlus2 on windows. (Incidentally, I paid the money for EditPlus, and have never regretted it.) For C/C++ on Windows, I'm using Bloodshed's DevC++, and am fairly happy with it.

On my dev and test Windows VM,s I installed a WAMP stack from e-Novative http://www.e-novative.info/software/wamp.php. This made for a trouble-free installation; and I personally prefer Apache for dev/test. We do deploy to IIS, so I have a test server VM with IIS as well.

I am currently in the process of moving the test server VM's onto an actual server. I have a dual Xeon HP server just sitting here loaded up with Suse10.2 and VMware server. Once I get the access channels set up into/out of the network, I'll migrate those VMs over.