My PC's Setup

First, I'll describe the hardware of my local desktop system:

• AMD 64 dual core 6000+ (3GHz)
• 1.5GB DDR2 RAM
• 250GB SATA HDD + 20GB IDE slave HDD
• ATI Radeon X1200 onboard Gfx card
• Windows XP Pro on master

Software on local desktop:

• WAMP with Apache 2, PHP 5 and MySQL 5 - see how it is setup properly here.
• Netbeans 6.5 with Java 1.6.0_11. Get it here.
  
• Linux Ubuntu 8.04 running on Virtual Machine (Sun Virtualbox)

I also have a webserver at my disposal (ish) but that's my business ;)

Anyway, the reason I'm running Linux on a VM rather than on a seperate disk or partition is because it tries to install on the IDE drive and ignores the SATA master when I try to install it. I use Linux for my Perl scripting since its installed on Linux by default - until I have a good reason to install Perl on Windows I will continue my Perl hacking on Linux.