Setting up a PHP development environment on your local system
This is an old post I had written on google docs, before VMware Server was free for the general user. Thought could be still more relevant to the general developer for testing in Linux envoirment. VMPlayer I beleive is lighter than VMware Server. There are 2 stages of setting up the development & testing environment for yourself. The preferred work environment is Linux. If you already on Linux then you can safely skip Stage I, you can directly proceed to Stage II, also if you have Linux already installed, just cross check if you have the LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) server installed.