After being a bit frustrated with the performance of Parallels on my MacBook Pro (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM), I gave VMware Fusion a try last week. At first glance its performance footprint on the host system didn’t seem as heavy as the one from Parallels Desktop for Mac. Of course switching between host and guest system is always a tedious task for he machine. With Parallels I often observed that some of the applications running on the host system stalled, showing me the colorful beach ball of death. This can get really annoying.
After a while, I observed a similar behavior even with Fusion and I got more frustrated, wanting to throw the whole machine out the window, or maybe throwing Windows out the machine (I can’t remember). Anyway, to make the long story short, I stumbled across Sun’s VirtualBox, which is Open Source and just love it. Its footprint on the host performance is almost imperceptible. It boots Windows XP Profession in 1 Minute! Of course VirtualBox is not as feature laden as Parallels or Fusion. But I need the system mainly for browser tests (don’t we all love Internet Explorer?) and some applications that only run on Windows, so I don’t need features like 3D graphic acceleration, Coherence etc. That’s why VirtualBox is now my first choice when it comes to virtualization solutions for the Mac.
Thank you Sun!
Step 1: Unpack silverstripe-v2.2.2.tar.gz
Step 2: Move folder over to a web server
Step 3: Point browser to sliverstripe folder
Step 4: Insert credentials for MySQL database and admin account
Step 5: Push “Install SilverStripe” button
Step 6: Delete install files
Ready for take off!
First road bump: After installation I clicked on the “Home” tab and got a 404 because it tried to access one of the install files (check-php.php) which have been deleted one step before. A quick search in the SilverStripe forum pointed me to the easy solution to clear the browser cache (why didn’t I think of this myself?).
I guess now it’s time to get my hands dirty and dig into the SilverStripe tutorials. Since it’s already in the one digit hours, I’m off for a pit stop and will take this baby onto the next leg within the next few days.
The first leg (installation) was more like a walk in the park than the usual CMS installation. Can’t wait to really get up to speed.
This time it’s a conference not somewhere across the globe but right in my neighborhood; the Webkongress in Erlangen.
I’m really looking forward to the following panels:
- Wet Floor und Coverflow: Canvas in HTML5 (Martin Kliehm, Namics AG)
- CSS Frameworks – Erwartungen, Mythen und reale Vorteile (Dirk Jesse, Webkrauts)
- Effizientere Applikationen mit jQuery UI (Paul Bakaus, Liferay Inc.)
- Gute Ergebnisse dauern (Jens Grochtdreis, Webkrauts, SinnerSchrader AG)
- Barrierefreiheit im Jahre 2008 – Mehr offene Fragen als Antworten? (Tomas Caspers, Web Standards Project)
- Digital Bohème: Workspaces und Lifephases (Volker Buzek, RRZE und Marcel Ritter, RRZE)
- Die 10 drängendsten Herausforderungen des Web (Jens Grochtdreis, Webkrauts, SinnerSchrader AG)
- Webdesigner an die Macht! (Eric Eggert, yatil.de)
- 6 Beispiele für die nützliche Anwendung von Mikroformaten (Michael Jendryschik, itemis AG)
- Webstandards – noch immer ein Thema? (Nils Pooker, Webkrauts, Pookerart)
A great opportunity to eventually meet more Webkrauts in person.
