A Virtual Solution for Mobile Development

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From this posting you can tell we like Apple mac and unix. i don't like my Dell any more here comes the facts.

My delivery date was weeks out and I had work to do. Being tied to a desktop computer just didn’t feel right. I looked at some of the “retail” laptops at Staples but couldn’t bring myself to purchase 1/2 a laptop at 2/3 the price of a “real” machine — like the one I already had on order from Dell. And, besides, I had a somewhat seldom-used MacBook on my desk, it wasn’t as if I were entirely without a laptop.

Now, if I were to go out of the house with a MacBook, my first preference would be one of those cool, aluminum uni-body types — not the girlie-looking white plastic version sitting on my desk. I purchased it so I could do some iPhone development over a year ago. It’s just a color, I know, but thinking back, I could have purchased basically the same device in black with a little more video ram. Hindsight is 20/20 they say. But, the thing has a 2.4 GHz Intel Dual Core — not too bad, particularly considering the fact that the new (and expensive) varieties are not all that much faster — and certainly not worth the additional investment considering what I was about to try next.

irtualBox

Using the MacBook itself isn’t really all that bad — I have been looking for an excuse to use MacOSX a little bit more anyway. It is a pretty intuitive platform and increasingly, software development environments support OSX right out of the gate. If you doubt it, just go to a mobile software conference and everyone it seems is using a Mac.

The trouble was that I had a handful of applications for which I just had to use Windows. Yes, I know I should be using Linux — you can make the comments if you like. And yes, I could use the Mac VPN client and the RDP client to connect to servers and run a couple of administrative applications at my consulting firm — software applications that only run on Windows. However, the idea of running Windows 7 “inside” my Mac was too enticing. So, I took the virtual plunge.

Armed with my MacBoox, a respectable 160GB, 5400 RPM hard drive and a meager 2GB of RAM, I ventured into the land of VirtualBox from Sun

If you are not familiar with VirtualBox, you can learn more in this http://www.virtualbox.org/

After a couple of VirtualBox upgrades, most recently to version 3.1.2, I had a reasonably stable Windows 7 installation. However, it was awfully slow — yes, slower than one would expect, despite the virtual configuration.

After a Christmas Eve visit to the Genius Bar and a $200 donation to Mr. Jobs and his elves, I upgraded my MacBook to 4GB of RAM. Throw in a 500GB, 7200 RPM Hitachi hard drive and my MacBook was starting to show some brawn. Even if it is still the white plastic variety.

Even more cool is the nice wide-screen monitor on my desk which houses my “Windows 7″ environment in beautiful full-screen while I have the MacBook’s built-in display for running Firefox, Finder, iTunes, etc. Add to the mix the “Spaces” feature and I’ve now got four desktops x 2 monitors. Too bad I cannot get 8 GB of RAM into this thing!

OK, but can I get any work done you ask?

What about my files?

At this point my development files, and everything else I seemed to have accumulated over the past 37 months on my Dell, were still sitting on the orphaned hard drive. Borrowing a SATA/USB drive caddy from my network support friends, I copied the files over to a directory sitting in my home directory on the MacOSX side of things.

I was able to “share” the files via VirtualBox’s built-in \\vboxsvr sharing mechanism. However, the file access was pitifully slow. Unbearably slow. A number of Internet searches turned up some problems with NetBios over TCP, name resolution timeouts for every packet and other low-level networking stuff that just tested my patience. The guy who was responsibl

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