Hi guys,<br><br>My wife bought a Mac over a year ago and swears by it yet I am adverse to spending the $$$ on yet another proprietary solution. I'm a s/w engineer and necessarily have an attachment to the .NET world as these days I find myself writing apps in C#. I'm used to a unix cross-compile platform and so have finally considered that my next all around home/office/development "rig" might be Ubuntu. I'm running 8.04 on an old laptop with not a lot of resources. I like it. I do find things that seem like bugs on occasion but I'm willing to consider some of my issues might very well be Operator Error. <br>
<br>Do you guys stake your professional lives on Ununtu or have you relegated it to the realm of hobby?<br><br>Has anyone had success with VirtualBox? It looks like I can run pretty much any flavor of alternate OS (XP, Vista, etc.) similar to Parallels in Mac. Any thoughts on the subject of virtualization of other OSes?<br>
<br>Finally, if I commit to this route I'm going to need a box with some real resources. So far I've come across System76.com. Does anyone know about these guys and/or who may be the best vendor to sell raw hardware or Ubuntu pre-installed at competitive prices?<br>
<br>Thanks so much. <br><br>Eric Mohler<br>