Coworkers. A horror! They demand everything to be easy. And then they array with questions about XAMPP (especially WAMP), and why windows has path problems or why sendmail doesn’t work on Windows and so forth. But I don’t do bloody support on Windows!

Nothing is better than a real linux or unix. Windows just can’t do the job! So we’re here to provide two alternative solutions: andLinux or a real Linux inside a VM as WAMP replacement.

andLinux runs smoothly here, but everything I hear around is, that it doesn’t run smooth elsewhere. So, it’s probably better to check out some VMs…

So, open the curtain for…

VAMP – Virtual Apache MySQL, PHP (and Perl)

I had another good time today trying Sun’s VirtualBox with install of Ubuntu-install with KDE 4.1 (oh gawdamnit –  or bloated than Windows Vista!), than with XFCE (still no file shares in the filemanger?) and then again with good old GNOME But still i had a hard time explaining the Admin-GUIs of Apache, BIND and so forth to my collegues. WAMP was still easier too use – a yeah

So my goal so far is to set up a VirtualBox installation with an easy to use LAMP enivronment, based on some features of Sun’s VirtualBox (which indeed is faster than VMware):

• You setup a transient folder within VirtualBox (a folder that is used on and  by your host OS as well as the VM the same time – no SAMBA fileserver!)
• This transient folder is mounted into Linux by using the Virtual Box FS (vboxfs)
• From there project homepages will be delivered.
• So, we need a DNS server to provide the host a valid domain name.
• And will use Apache dynamic virtual hosts to route the domain names to associated document root.
• The VAMP-VM shows it’s IP address after boot, to insert for you as DNS server.
• The user uses MySQL or SSH to administer the server and still can add other software just as needed.

Well, i started again with Debian, which suddenly grew from a 70MB HD image to over 900MB – just by installing PEAR, PHP5, MySQL, Perl, BIND9 and Apache2!  I don’t like the idea to install Linux XAMPP tarballs on the server either, but i expect the final HD image will have finaly  less than 100MB in compressed format…  well this is a good start for the VAMP-project