As a developer, I constantly need to install different kinds of software, packages and sometimes, I even need to download binary software or build it from source. And as days go by, I end up in a situation that the software works on mine won’t work on my colleagues due to all kinds of different reasons. Also, I won’t try some software that needs a lot set up because I am afraid of breaking my current working equilibrium. This weekend, I set up a Ubuntu Virtual box 14.04 with Eclipse installed. After tweaking the 3D acceleration for a while, I have an environment that is ready for Apache Nutch development. And I can really rewind the clock whenever I think “shoot… which file did I changed? which environment variable did I change…It was working perfectly before..”.

You basically install Ubuntu on virtual box, then install Eclipse either from the market place or build from source. Here are a few links that helped me a lot:

1. How to install Eclipse from source
2. Why the GUI is super slow and how to fix it.
3. Wonderful tutorial of setting up Nutch in Eclipse
4. Make subclipse stop complaining

Then you are good to go!

The snapshots feature in Virtualbox is already very handy. It is link the image version idea of Docker, but the GUI in virtualbox is much more mature than Docker.