Virtual Development environment on Linux distro

[ikkyusan]

Hi,

I would like to install a very light linux distribution. Light enough to be an host running virtualbox (or vmware player) and then a linux virtual machine of choice on it.
Occasionally I could be in needs of running a windows distribution.

The reason why I would like to do this is that I am a developer. I found much convenient to prepare my development environment and run it from machine to machine. Rather than reinstalling a distribution and set it up each time I buy a new laptop.

Do you think it's possible ? The alternative could be to make a kind of linux image and install on a brand new PC, but I don't know how to do that and what are the downside of it.

thanks

[Rubberman]

All Linux distributions of a similar generation will be equally "light" depending upon the services you are running and the drivers that are installed. Will your host be a workstation/server type of machine, or will it be a laptop?

[ikkyusan]

thanks for your reply.
The host will be a laptop, because I move often to clients.

What do you think are the minimal services or libraries to keep for that purpose ?

[Rubberman]

Well, I usually install a regular Linux distribution, like Ubuntu 9.04, on my laptops along with VirtualBox which I use to run Windows in a VM. Ubuntu is fairly resource intensive, but my 4GB laptop has plenty to handle that. If you have 2GB or less memory, then a lighter weight installation would be good. Ubuntu can be installed with the XFCE desktop manager which is considerably lighter than Gnome or KDE. Alternatively, you can install something like Gentoo and configure it with only the components that you really need. That approach takes a considerable amount of time, especially if you have never done something like that before (build a system from scratch basically). The first time I installed Gentoo it took me about 2 weeks before I had a system that worked properly with all of my hardware.