TestDrive is an Ubuntu application that is especially designed for non-technical users to easily download and run the latest Ubuntu development daily snapshot in a virtual machine.

USB flash drives are really cheap these days, so I decided to create a portable environment that contains all my favorite applications, as well as Java IDEs and utilities. This is attractive since I can boot up any computer with this thumb drive, and have the same environment to work with. Besides, it is kind of cool.

I have started using Ubuntu 8.04 in few days ago and found it Great. So, now I’ve moved my development environment from windows and working in Ubuntu. Here I am just explaining what steps I had to take for this jump. Also have a listing of some development related softwares/tools which I am using as replacement of windows applications.

We can do PHP programming by any text editor, such as vi and nano. However, a Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is good for debugging. For IDE, I choose EasyEclipse for LAMP and it is not required to install. Download it and double click it to run. However, we should install some server programs and do some configuration before using it.

I followed the instructions mentioned in this NetBeans Wiki to install NB 6.0 on my ubuntu. But I feel some more information can be added to this wiki. For example, when i ran the command "sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk", ubuntu complained to me that this package is not found in its repositories.

I know there are plenty of articles and posts for setting up a development server. Yet I still find the need to write up the exact commands and process for my later self to refer to, especially since I haven’t found a clone function in VMware Fusion like the linux version has. A pet “when-I-have-time” project would be to turn these steps into a bash script.