Fedora Core 14 as VM

Well, I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate as my native OS.

However, I'm going to be doing some personal coding in PHP using the LAMP stack, and in order to get that "L", I need a Linux installation. I thought of several approaches:

• Repartition my HDD and run a dual-boot Windows 7 / Fedora Core 14. There are several downsides to this approach. One is the fact that I never know how much space to allocate to each. The other is the fact that rebooting to get into the other OS is a pain. I've done dual boot (actually done tri-boot for Windows 98 / Windows NT / Red Hat back in the day) and the reality is I would end up spending ALL of my time in one OS.


• Reformat my HDD to run Linux natively and do my Windows work in a VM.


• Leave my HDD running Windows natively and do all my Linux work in a VM.

The last option (running Windows natively, Linux work in VM) seemed like the path of least resistance, and also the best fit for how I work on personal development projects. I do a lot of stuff in Microsoft .NET (as previous blog posts probably show), and I hate running an IDE in a VM. I am planning on doing my PHP development in Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) with PHP IDE PDT plugged in. I can just run Eclipse in Windows 7 natively. However, I couldn't run Visual Studio .NET in Linux natively.

One of my favorite things about VMware and this approach is how easy it is to roll back. If I were to repartition my HDD and something went wrong, I'm in a bad spot, which entails a complete reinstall of OS and Applications.

With VMware, if something goes horribly, horribly wrong with my VM, I can always just delete the files and start over.

I've never had it come to that, there's always snapshots to revert back to for VMware.

Additional notes:

1. I tried to install using my "User" account without admin privileges in Windows 7. I've started trying to emulate the Unix security model in Windows of running as a limited privileges user and only login / su / sudo root when needing to do something like install software. This caused a problem, since VMware player need to install VMware Tools for Linux. Oops.


2. VMware's Easy Install failed for my FC 14 install. Anaconda / kickstart got an error. Not sure why, but rather than try to run it down (I've never been a big fan of things that try to turn an already simple installation into a managed easy install), I just created a blank VM and installed FC 14 on my own. This worked just fine.