7 Language Lion

So, many moons ago I started working through the 7 languages in 7 weeks book. I saw signs of the loveliness that has won Ruby so many fans, and I battled with Io, eventually finishing the section ready to move on to another language. It was around that time that I ran out of steam. Tucking myself away in my room to learn about a new language doesn't fit well with trying to play family man, and installing a bunch of new languages on my mac when I don't have a good Unix background to know if I'm screwing my system up left me a little concerned too.

Fast forward a few months and Mac OS X Lion is released for a bargain price. I decided to set up my much neglected laptop with Apple's latest big cat and start using it for the development of my development. With this release Apple have relaxed their restrictions about using the OS on virtual machines which struck me as an excellent opportunity. At this time, VMWare Fusion is helping to enforce Apple's old restrictions by only letting you run server versions of OS X in their VMs, but with a little help from this excellent post here I was able to create a hacked image that satisfies VMWare.

That gives me a nicely virtualised sandbox to be able to mess around to my heart's content without screwing up the main OS installation and with the added ability to roll back to an earlier snapshot if necessary, but this icing on the cake came with this next link. Here we see how to set up Spaces in Lion so that Fusion can be restricted to a single screen. This allows me to easily switch back and forth between the main OS and the VM with a gesture. Marvellous.

The starting point for my dev VM has Lion, XCode, Git and Gitbox. Whilst this is available on the mac app store, getting it straight from the dev's site means that there is a free download which allows me to use it with up to 3 repositories rather than having to fork out £27.99, which is great for my light usage. My free private Git repo is provided by unfuddle. Github may be getting all the publicity, but I like being able to keep my code private which usually costs monies, so kudos to unfuddle for that too. After snapshotting that for ready rollbackability, I've installed GNU Prolog, so will be hoping to delve into the next chapter soon.