Which Linux distro is best for running in a virtual machine, for programming research?

Question

I'd like to learn LAMP development for my own personal edification.

I tried setting up Ubuntu 8.10 "Hardy Heron" in Microsoft VPC, but I can't get the video to work above 800x600. Played with xorg.conf a million times but no joy. Can anyone recommend a good distro to work with that plays well with VPC? Any guidance on getting started with Apache and Perl/PHP would also be welcome.

Answer 1

I installed ubuntu 8.10 in a virtual machine on my Vista 64-bit laptop. I attempted the install with Virtual PC, VM Ware and Virtual Box from SUN. Virtual Box was the only vm software that I was successful with from the start. In the setup you choose that you are installing linux as your guest OS and everything works without spending your evening sifting through blogs trying to get install to work.

Answer 2

Firstly, if your goal is to learn LAMP development, I'd start by just downloading the WAMP stack for windows from http://www.wampserver.com/en/ or one of it's competitors. The "Linux" part of LAMP programming isn't likely to be a major part of your learning experience. Avoiding running a VM will be much less resource intense on your development workstation and avoid having issues with suspend/resume and disk IO contention.

Secondly, any linux should work, under virtualbox or msvpc. All the modern desktop virtualization systems emulate a full system, so it's just a matter of configuration and getting the right drivers. Like others said, virtualbox is more open source friendly so give that a shot.

Finally, I don't usually run X on my development VM's, since it just eats unnecessary resources. Just use putty on the host and ssh in to a VM running in console mode.

Not entirely the answer to your question, but I think it attacks your goal more directly.