This evening I setup a CentOS VirtualBox (Virtual Machine). During installation of CentOS, I chose "minimal server" - However, there's some additional work that you need to do to get this up and running.
- Setup minimal CentOS with networking.
- Add RPMForge as a yum repo.
- Install guest additions on CentOS. This allows you to have a folder on your host machine (windows / mac) to be available to the guest operating system. You can find the VBoxGuestAdditions ISO here if you can't find it on your machine (hint, it's in the same directory where you've installed virtualbox).
Where am I going with all this and why? Well, now I can edit the files on my machine and have Tomcat or Ruby or Clojure in a stable linux environment and pointing at my windows directory with my files and still use Builder/Sublime/{{FavoriteEditorHere}} to edit. I've also manipulated my router to have my DHCP server always assign my virtualbox mac address the same ip address. Now I'll be able to edit my windows host file for some cheap DNS manipulation.
Once my virtual machine is up and running, I make sure my folder that I'm sharing is setup correctly in virtualbox. In CentOS, I type:
mount -t vboxsf (folder alias that I've setup in virtualbox) /directory/where/this/is/mounted
For example:
mount -t vboxsf sample /data/web/website/www
It takes a few seconds after hitting that command, but keep typing 'ls' and wait for your files to show up. When they do, you're up and running. You can then start up your tomcat process, etc.