I have installed Parallels Desktop on both Windows 7 Pro. and Ubuntu Karmic. 2 guest operating system was my test case, which were Windows XP Pro. and Ubuntu Karmic (again ). By the way I have licences for all operating systems I use both as host and guest. Quick and dirty way of telling my observations to you is a pros and cons list i guess.

Pros:

- Automatic installation of Windows systems (Requires you have a licence of guest OS)

- Simpler shared folder management

Cons:

- Bad performance compared to other virtualization products

- Similar product is free (VirtualBox) but this one is commercial

- Really bad visual performance and responsiveness

- 3D support doesn’t worked out of the box on Ubuntu Karmic guest.

- Linux version’s performance is good but of course if you can make it run!

Results: Short way, there is no need to pay some bucks to commercial software while you have a better one free, VirtualBox. Looks like a fine system if you are planning to use it on server virtualization because non-graphical application performance is really good and supervisor have an option for dynamic balancing of system resources. But for a workstation virtualization this software is far from perfect. Linux installation is easy but installing and running guest OSes is a head ache. Also have a USB driver problem on linux hosts which ends up with a frozen system. My opinion is give a chance on Parallels server systems but for desktop virtualization use VirtualBox.

By the way maybe one of the most important things I observed while playing with Windows Virtual PC is it’s problems with linux. Do not try to install linux on Windows Virtual PC. I have tried installing Ubuntu, although live CD and installation worked fine i couldn’t started the installed system. I didn’t check the manuals about this (or the help files as Microsoft calls them) but what i was expecting is to at least seeing buggy working linux. On this phase you have great alternatives on market like VirtualBox which supports Windows and Linux OS as guest and host.

Update: Recently installed Windows XP on VirtualBox and when it comes to performance VirtualBox is far more better than any other alternative, again.

First thing to do is to install XAMPP for linux on your system. There is nice explanation about how to do this on it’s own site, so i think this won’t be a hard task for any of you geeks or nerds.

Second thing is to download and install development package for XAMPP on linux. It could be installed the same way and of course there is an explanation for that too.

So you have downloaded, installed and configured (secured) your XAMPP for linux and it’s development package. Surpirse! Development package was not needed. Really, you could done the all procedure without installing development files, but I insist on installing those files because they probably will be needed for others things you would try to do in feature.

And yet comes the tricky part. If you are using a 64bit linux system like I do, trying to compile Xdebug as 32bit extension for PHP on a 64bit compiler, don’t do it. Well, I am sure about it there is a way to do this right but my opinion is trying to this is really pain in the **s. Our trick to get Xdebug extension without compiling it is to visit this website which has remote debugging packages for Komodo IDE. You will need 32bit linux “PHP Remote Debugging” package. There is your 32bit compiled Xdebug extension, in somewhere on that package.

Next step: “cp xdebug.so /opt/lampp/lib/php/extensions”, with something like this command, copy your Xdebug extension to your php extension directory on your LAMPP install.

If you had no problems until here, then your job is nearly finished. Only thing left to do is to tell your php installation to use Xdebug as an extension. Adding these lines to your php.ini

[Xdebug]
zend_extension = "/opt/lampp/lib/php/extensions/xdebug.so"
xdebug.profiler_output_dir = "/tmp/xdebug/"
xdebug.profiler_enable = On
xdebug.remote_enable = On
xdebug.remote_host = "localhost"
xdebug.remote_port = 9000
xdebug.remote_handler = "dbgp"

will do the work. But remember you can not use Xdebug extension with Zend Debugger together. You have to choose one of them. If your installation is configured to work with Zend Debugger, please disable it.(by commenting out the Zend Debugger extension)

That’s all and your 32bit Xdebug extension on 32bit LAMPP installation on a 64bit linux should work fine. Feel free to leave feedback.

Also if you like to compile your own Xdebug here the sites I found while i was searching over and over:

Install ‘xdebug’ PHP extension for XAMPP on linux

Getting Xdebug to work with Apache/XAMPP to debug PHP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS

http://toreuyar.net/projects/linux-network-programming/

Anyway, here is the page what you probably looking for, the cheat sh*ts!

http://www.techieblogger.com/2009/10/linux-unix-ubuntu-solaris-cheat-sheets.html