Sun’s VirtualBox is ideal for testing different desktop environments (for example, browser testing), but I’ve discovered it’s also great for running a test server environment. Instead of setting up Apache, PHP, and MySQL right on your desktop machine, you can place them in a virtual Linux server. That way there’s no interference with your desktop, and you can ensure that your development environment is as close as possible to your eventual deployment environment.

With a virtual Linux server running inside your desktop operating system, you can SSH into it, upload files to it, load web pages from it–whatever you’d do with a real live server. And all the software you need is free and simple to configure. Let’s make a start!

I'm using virtualbox to run windows on my ubuntu system. I'm running a local server on my ubuntu configuration. I installed also some FTP server to access my webserver from the client. This article is a great example to do this upside down. I like this Virtualbox a lot :)

For a stark contrast, compare Windows 7 with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, its would-be competitor.  I won’t get into the argument over which OS sees the other as competition, maybe they both do. In the marketplace, however, the upgrade version of Snow Leopard costs $49.95 ($99.95 for a five-machine family pack) while there are twenty different versions of Windows 7 to choose from with the most popular (Windows 7 Home Premium) priced at $119.95.

Is Windows 7 really worth $70 more than Snow Leopard?

Must say I like the family package for the Mac OS, this way people will pay for an upgrade. Why should a family invest xxx USD into an operating system? In my case we have 4 computers one of them is still using win 2000 (yeah that an old one), one is a XP machine and the other two notebooks running on Ubuntu. If I need to buy a new (desktop) system I would consider a new license for a windows OS, if it's cheap...