Sometime back I wrote a step-by-step guide for setting up PHP development environment in a virtual machine. This is a simplified (& less tiring) version of that.
You’ll need a few things to proceed:
- A computer, ofcourse. I used a MacBook Pro running OS-X Lion.
- Oracle’s VirtualBox VM software – get it from here.
- A linux distro. We will use Ubuntu Server here. Current LTS version is 12.04. Download the 32 bit ISO from here. Remember to download 32 bit version, the 64 bit version is kinda sluggish on less than 4 GB of RAM. 32 bit version is good enough for running web development stack unless you have specific needs.