Ubuntu on Virtual Machine

I am currently running Ubuntu on a virtual machine, and my laptop is running Vista.

I gave up a while ago trying to battle with Microsoft Virtual PC, the support for any Linux flavour is non-existant (as you would expect it to be from Microsoft). You can get them working with a decent amount of hacks to the installation setup, but it's not always consistent.

There are a couple of other options, which I have tested and work with no problems.

Virtualbox, and VMWare Player.

I setup Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on Virtualbox and VMWare, with a bunch of other packages, including Apache2, PHP5, MySQL5, Eclipse, Java, Subversion, and Samba. Samba can be used to network between Windows and Linux, so you can develop the files on the Windows share, and the virtual machine is the localhost server, in a full Linux type environment of course.

I was up and running in just under 2 hours with this setup.