About VirtualBox with the Jar Bar and Yucca Nel
VirtualBox, What a tool! Yes I can't praise it enough for being the most valuable tool to me as a developer. It would be too length a write-up to go into every detail I love about Virtualbox, but most are situated around it's ability to run any additional system on top of my host Operating System.
Why I use VirtualBox at the Jar Bar and as a Java developer tool
VirtualBox is extremely flexible, scalable and maintainable with it's ability to take snapshots of the current state of any guest system and of course it's ability to to extend your system to a guest system and that systems own unique benefits.
VirtualBox combines the Operating Systems I want as a developer
To give an example: I run windows and can therefore run tools like Camatasia that are native to Windows. Other such tools are Photoshop, OVI store for Nokia & more. These are not unique to my system, but the aspects of potential guest systems are; like the ability to use securer systems for every day work & browsing like Ubuntu. These Systems are not only more secure, but are FREE (as in freedom) & Have a ton of free software to do every day tasks like: photo editing(The GIMP), burning cd's and office suites like Libre Office.
VirtualBox allows me to
My hands are tied though to VirtualBox as a developer, because I need a system that provides me with a similar environment to the one I use to deploy web applications to. The bash shell/terminal is well used and known to developers and on Ubuntu it provides a SSH client out-the-box to interact with most production servers like the one that hosts this site at Eapps.com.
I need to run as many browsers as possible for ensuring that content I author, looks appealing on the multitude of browsers available. Browsers like Safari and Internet Explorer are limited to Macintosh and Windows. Again VirtualBox together with VirtualPC (another VM ware) provide opportunities to do so. It may seem tedious and overkill to test on all these browsers, but the task is made easy due to the ability to deploy the application to a single web server like Tomcat that has start scripts for both Windows and Unix systems and the ability of Virtualbox to share that server between multiple systems. This would not be possible on servers that only support a single operating system and would be expensive and tedious to test on all variations. Thankfully you only need 2 systems to test all these browsers(Windows 7 up) and a Ubuntu based system with additional configuring.
At least give it a try! Everything is free! Simply get VirtualBox and look through this page for an idea on a suitable Linux/Unix. It would be a good idea perhaps to get a well documented system like Ubuntu to start off with and if you are committed to moving permenantly, grab a book on the topic from Oreilly or Amazon.