[clug] Virtualisation solution for development

[Ben Nizette]

Hi All,

For the last several months I've been trying to keep 32-bit and 64-bit development files playing nicely together on my Ubuntu 64-bit dev box.  Each time I find a new, dumb, 32-bit, proprietary package I spend ages creating a set of $PATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH and symlinks that will actually get the stupid thing to run.  And those then break my finely tuned environment for the other stupid packages.  I've started creating scripts that set up a good environment, run the program, then tear it down again but that's getting tedious, I've had enough.

My first instinct was just to grab VirtualBox and install a 32-bit machine but surely there's a better, lighter-weight way!  Especially as many of the stupid packages have to talk to host hardware, eg programmers, which aren't completely trivial to punch through a VM.

I've had a brief look at OpenVZ but it looks like when they say 'same OS workloads' they really mean it; I thought they could support parallel distributions so long as they were all Linux-based but it looks like I was wrong.

Anyone got ideas?  Done the same thing?

Thanks,
	--Ben.