[development] Development platform?

[António P. P. Almeida]

On 11 Set 2010 04h44 WEST, jeff at ayendesigns.com wrote:

> I'm curious to hear what others are using as a development
> platform. I'm dying a slooooooow motion death on mine. I have a 2GHz
> dual-core laptop with 3Gb of memory running Vista. I decided I
> wanted to develop on Linux, so I'm running Vbox with Ubuntu 10.4 as
> the guest, with 1.5Gb of memory and 50Gb of disk (only using about
> 8) alloted to it.
>

With that machine and modern OS there's no need to buy
anything. Windows as a development platform is rather poor. Unless
you're developing .NET stuff. Get a UNIX OS. It's older (70s tech)
than Windows (80s tech) but a much more solid platform. Completely
different approach, the command line is one of its greatest assets
IMHO.

Install Debian Squeeze and say goodbye to most of your problems. I'm
in a machine with less power than yours, running several Drupal dev
installs, firewall, MTA, with no problems. I dumped Apache some time
ago and run nginx exclusively. 

> As I type this message, the letters appear a second or two after
> I've typed them (thankfully I'm a touch typer and it buffers). Don't
> even ask about running update.php or bringing up the modules
> page...several minutes each. In looking at the resource monitor,
> it's not memory (no paging is going on) but the CPU is pegged. All I
> have running is firefox, chrome and thunderbird at the
> moment. Jedit, which is much lighter than JavaBeans, etc., runs
> painfully slow too.

Drop Firefox and get Chromium. The new 6 beta release is a good deal
faster than the previous 5.0.375, so it seems. The chromium browser
inspector is roughly at par with firebug.

--- appa