I’ve done some pretty good work last week, but more about that in a later post.
Because first of all, I think I should give you some background information about the way I work, the projects I’m working on and some projects I’ve done in the past.
As mentioned before, the main part of the projects I develop as freelance webdesigner are built around PHP and MySQL technologies.
Alltough these sites run on Linux production servers, I develop them on a Windows 2000 system inside a VMWare box. This is really the best piece of software on the planet! It allows me to run *any* operating system in a secure local environment while browsing and mailing and downloading and … with my WindowsXP.
VMWare also allows me to set different kinds of configurations and test different technologies without messing up my working environment. Don’t really understand what I’m talking about? Read this:
I have 1 single computer (a 2 year old Dell Dimension) with Microsoft Windows XP.
- Browsers: Mozilla Firebird (once you’ve given it a try, you can’t live without it) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (doesn’t car about web standards, but since many so called ‘web developers’ build their web sites with only IE in mind, you can’t live without it either)
- E-mail Clients: Mozilla Thunderbird (for personal e-mail) and Microsoft Outlook (for my professional e-mail and communication, and because it has a calander and planning functionality and it was bundled with Office)
- Microsoft Office XP (was installed on the system and I havent ’t really given OpenOffice a try since it was released, so I think I’ll stick with it for a while)
- And some other software for daily use (media players, P2P stuff, …)
As you can see, anything but a real *Internet Development Dream Machine*. But with the magic of VMWare I turn it into any *Dream Machine* I want to. Here’s a list of what I have:
- Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 4.0
- Windows 98 with Internet Explorer 5.0
- Windows Me with Internet Explorer 5.5
- Windows 2000 Server with Mozilla 1.1, Internet Explorer 5.5, Office 97, Apache 1.3.28, PHP 4.1, MySQL 3.20, Visual Studio 6
- Windows 2000 Server with Mozilla 1.4, .NET Framework, Internet Explorer 6.0, Office 2000, Apache 2.0.47, PHP 4.3.2, MySQL 3.23.57, Adobe Photoshop 7, Visual Studio .NET 2000
- Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, installed recently, so not really configured except for Apache 2.0.47 and PHP 5 beta
- Linux: I don’t really work with Linux, but I’m always trying to learn to work with it, so that one day I can change everything to Linux. I’ve installed many flavours of Linux including Mandrake 8 and 9, Red Hat 8 and 9 Suse 8 and also the Live Eval and recently Debian, but it gave me some problems and I gotta retry later.
- I’m still looking for some old MS-DOS 5.0/6.0 and Windows 3.11 disk to set up these machines too, just for fun.
As you can see, I have about 8 different configurations and lots more if I need to, all on 1 desk and on 1 machine 🙂