Developer's Quarterdeck Log

If you are a developer you can really benefit by using Solaris as your development OS. However, many are scared off by trying to get it setup. However, there is a little know short cut. That is the VMware for Solaris, Developer Edition It is a prebuilt VM image of Solaris Community Edition with a plenty of developer's tools preinstalled. I have been using it at as my primary development system at my new job for the past couple of weeks. I am shocked at how well it works. No need for multiple machines with a KVM. All I do is set Solaris' resolution the same as my Windows desktop. Then I just switch to VMware and hit ctrl-alt-enter and the whole screen is my Solaris desktop. Almost as good as the Sun Blade 1000/SUnpci combo. I figured it would be too slow but so far so good. The only bad thing has been Emacs doesn't accept the alt key as the meta so I need to use esc instead. I am sure the is a fix I can put in my .emacs but I just haven't got there yet.

My only wish was that Solars was the host and Windows was the guest instead of the other way around. Maybe one day...

Part of my new job I have to work with Linux. So I have tried out a few distros. I really surprised at the differences between them. So far I installed on VMware Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, and Slackware. So far SUSE is the front runner since seems to work well on VMware and has a desktop similar to Solaris. Ubuntu just wouldn't work for me and Fedora has had some issues but works.

So any suggestions for a good Linux distro for development that works well on VMware?