[Lugstuff] newbie questions

[Eric Mohler]

Hi guys,

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.


Do you guys stake your professional lives on Ununtu or have you relegated it
to the realm of hobby?

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?

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?

Thanks so much.

Eric Mohler
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