Replacing a Development VPS with Linux on OSX

OSX is an OS where you run VMs for Linux and Windows. I keep seeing people saying how great and fast it is to do stuff on their mac and run Windows for a few apps incl. mail client, office suites, some dev tools and many java apps (cause they're often not so nice on OSX)<p>Then I see them with the Linux VM for all the dev tools, the hack tools, and so forth, because, well, hacking them up to work in OSX is always a pain, and even using stuff like brew is often a pain (+ delay)<p>Well I dunno, I run Linux native and I get stuff done faster than the ones running Linux in a VM of course. I also have Linux VMs under Linux when necessary, with KSM and it's a lot faster and memory efficient than when running OSX native on the same hardware.<p>I install stuff in about &#60;5s where it takes a VM to boot/resume in OSX, and about 5-10min to install from scratch when the app _supports_ OSX (ages if it doesn't but has more or less compliant sources)

Wonder if the author has considered checking out <a href="http://vagrantup.com/" rel="nofollow">http://vagrantup.com/</a> unless it does a bit too much for what they're after.

There are some useful tips in that article.<p>Using qemu in a no-gui mode is pretty cool. I've used VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and Parallels on OSX before, but I hate having to deal with the GUI window (and having the system reserve resources for it).<p>Since OSX is based on Unix under the hood, it shouldn't be too difficult to for a developer to use either OSX or Linux as their development machine. It's not like the knowledge gap between Windows and OSX/*nix machines. So other than messing around with Linux, the article fails to mention why he doesn't use OSX (other than some unfounded 'flaky' and 'impossible' critiques).

There is a problem with doing things this way. I want my development server to be always on, always available. It does things in the background and sometimes I use it when I'm away from the office.<p>Yes, you can keep your desktop machine on all the time, but that's a huge power suck. Shut down your desktop when you're not using it. Most development servers just don't need to be that beefy anyway.<p>A better approach, if you're absolutely committed to virtualization, is to just spin up an instance on Rackspace or Amazon. You'll pay about 10 bucks a month, which is less than you would for keeping your desktop running 24/7. On top of that, if your desktop dies, you won't lose your data.

I currently use a similar environment but with VirtualBox. Does qemu offer any advantages over it? I was considering recreating my VM so I may as well try qemu.

On a tangent to this, what is the "Linuxy" stuff you don't get to do on OS X? (My own frame of reference being an Ubuntu user.)

I recently got into an endless back and forth with a guy on reddit because I said that as a web developer, I require a mac (instead of a windows machine). When asked why I said that it is a hell of a lot easier to mimic testing/dev/production environments on a mac than windows and the only reason to choose a mac over a linux distro is because of the adobe dependance. His stance was that it isn't important to have your machine muddled up trying to replicate the dev/staging/production machines when you simply can develop on a remote box via some sort of ssh/file mounting. To which I replied with not always having access to remote dev machines, etc.<p>What is your take on this issue? I was actually surprised that people want to develop on remote machines. It reminds me of "ftp to see a change"

Unless you're on an ancient laptop I don't see why you wouldn't run a Linux VM if you are developing web apps.<p>What is the advantage of trying to make OS X your development environment and then deploying to a Linux host?<p>Unless you have an older laptop with less than 4 gigs of ram why not? Even with 2gigs it's not that system intensive to run a Linux guest os.

I also "deploy" to my local Linux VM for when I want to test a multi-server set up or try something new without messing up my main computer. Otherwise, I code and test almost exclusively on OSX. Haven't run into any situations yet where I wished I was coding in Linux as well. Linux doesn't have Photoshop or iTunes.

I'm following the instructions in the post on my Macbook Pro (2010); however I get 'Booting from DVD/CD... 180MB medium detected. Boot failed: Could not read from CDROM (code 0005) No bootable device.' Does anyone have any ideas why this is not working? I am using the netinstall Arch Linux ISO. Many thanks!

Anyone knows the difference in performance between QEMU and Virtualbox both running on OS X?

Protip for those of you virtualizing Linux using VMware Fusion: You can force quit VMWare Fusion and your VMs will continue to run in the background.

archlinux!