I have been wanting to set up a Linux development environment to work in at home for a while now. However my other half is a diehard Windows user – if I broke it she would not be amused!

I’m not too keen on dual booting – having read about people having problems messing with Vista on the same model as mine and ending up with bricks. I also would prefer not ro use Cygwin – it’s pretty good, but not the same. Maybe I’m just being too fussy, but I thing I have found a good solution – running a virtual machine.

I installed Sun’s free VirtualBox and and on top of this I installed Xubuntu. I chose Xubuntu because the Xfce as the Window manager doesn’t have the weird GNONE design decisions, bit is simpler than KDE.

Installing this way was pretty easy – just use the default values if you don’t know what to pick. The only issue I had was with the display resolution. It would only give me the choice of 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 pixels. If you are trying this yourself, then do not do what I did the first time – messing with xorg config files – you’ll only get in a mess! VirtualBox has a far cleverer solution.

Running Devices > Install Guest Additions… mounts an ISO with a shell script to install additional kernal modules. To install run:

sudo sh /media/cdrom0/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

I found that I needed to reboot the virtual machine a couple of times before it found the correct resolution, but since then it has had very few problems.

There are several features such as sharing folders between Windows and Linux, and USB support – which make the integration very slick.

Obviously I wouldn’t go running Maya on a virtual machine, but for coding it seems pretty responsive and I think this will work out quite well.