What OS do you use for development?

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What OS do you use for development?

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Started 4 months ago by Stepan Generalov
Latest reply from Martin

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cocojoe
Member

Macbook Pro 15" Late 2008 - 4GB
XCode 4.2 / Lion 10.7.2 / TexturePacker, PhysicsEditor, Zwoptex

Battery on Laptop even though it's within cycle limit is terrible, will sometimes just hard reset the machine after 5 mins off the AC. Have just bought 8GB RAM for it and a Crucial M4 SSD 128GB, tempted to go back to Snow Leopard.. Although Lion looks pretty the extra fluff is of no real benefit to me.

Virtual Machine
Snow Leopard / XCode 4.2
I use this when on my PC which is my primary machine.

@Birkemose you can have my 2x2GB (DDR3) sticks if you want, no use to me now.

I keep my main projects in github so it's easy to push/pull between machines.

Posted 4 months ago #
crmagicxxx
Member

Lion: 10.7.2
Xcode: 4.2.1
Handmade Mac: Intel Dual Core 2.9Ghz, 4GB, 22"

Posted 4 months ago #
Richard
Member

Main machine:

SW: Snow Leopard/XCode 4.2
HW: iMac11,3: i7 4+4 cores at 2.93GHz, 12GB RAM, 27" display (2560x1440) + 24" 2nd display at 1920x1200

Secondary machine:

SW: Lion, XCode 4.2
HW: iMac7,1: C2D @ 2.4GHz, 4MB RAM, 24" display (1920 x 1200)

Also have a Mac Mini that is on loan to a friend at the moment, running Lion + XCode 4.2, early-2009, 2.0GHz C2D with 4GB RAM.

All machines connected on a wired 1000T network with distributed builds - but am not sure that is worth it as by the time the jobs are distributed the main machine could have done the work anyway.

Always find there isn't enough screen space on a laptop which is why I've stuck with desktops.

Posted 4 months ago #
Martin
Member

@cocojoe: How good/bad is the performance when working within the virtual machine on your pc? What virtualization software do you use? Are you using a Hackintosh OS or is it possible to install vanilla snowleopard in a VM? What disadvantages or advantages do you see?

Posted 4 months ago #
slembcke
Administrator

@Richard: Yeah I dunno, I tried running distributed builds for a while too, but it seems to make either no difference at all or actually slow things down. This is even on my early 2008 MBP and using my 3.6GHz i7 iMac as a build server. Definitely not worth the effort in projects with a few hundred source files, I suspect it only actually works well once you have thousands of files and a million lines to compile.

You can probably install SL in a VM without too much trouble. Heck VMWare Fusion 4.1 had a "bug" when it added support for Lion virtualization where they accidentally added SL to the whitelist or something like that. The only fix in 4.1.1 was "Reintroduces the Mac OS X Server check after it was inadvertently omitted from 4.1.0". So... obviously it's not like it's a deep rooted issue preventing you from doing running it.

Posted 4 months ago #
slycrel
Member

Distributed builds were almost always faster with 3+ machines when apple used GCC. I've not found them to ever be faster in the case of LLVM, though I haven't done as much testing there. For small projets particularly it's usually not worth the overhead time of the distribution.

Posted 4 months ago #
Karl
Member

15" MBP, 2GHz i7, 256GB SSD, 4GB ram. Running Lion
Xcode 4.2.1 (worst. software. ever.)
TexturePacker
GitX
Audacity
Gimp & Photoshop
TextWrangler

4GB is not enough ram for a development environment, especially with Xcode being so memory inefficient and leaky. I currently have 39mb free memory, 74GB page ins and 19GB page outs. That's after 5 hours of use, and I don't even have PS open.

SSD helps tremendously. I'd never develop on a non-SSD machine again.

Posted 4 months ago #
cocojoe
Member

@Martin well it all depends on the underlying host really, on the PC I use just now it's pretty nice. Host i5 2500 (4 Core, 3.3GHz) 8GB, SSD, 1GB Nvidia GT 440. The SSD makes all the difference, just like @Karl I don't think I could go back now, the IO performance is great.

You will find in general outside of a Mac on Mac virtualisation it can be a bit of a hassle, if you look around there is a nice vanilla Snow Leopard VMware image floating around that works really well. I would recommend the latest VMware Player (free) works fine although you still need a 'patch' to unlock so it will work.

Allocating 2 Cores & 4GB Ram it runs well, most of the time I'm just using xcode so no real graphical use other than the simulator. Simulator runs about 40 fps vs 60fps on the MBP although I would say it compiles faster on the VM, most likely the raw CPU speed and of course the SSD. I've only just got the SSD for my MBP and don't have it installed yet so will see what difference that makes.

PM me if you need any advice on the above

Posted 4 months ago #
Martin
Member

@cocojoe: thanks a lot for the info and your offer. I might get back to that. My PC (q9300 4x2,5ghz 8gb ram geforce 9800gt and my ssd is in use by sample libraries) is a little slower than yours but it sounds like it could work. I tried installing osx in virtual box once and the performance was pretty crappy. But I think there are tools to install inside the VM os to improve performance and handling that are available for VMWare and not for virtualbox.
What version of snow leopard do you use inside the vm? I've seen images for various versions up to 10.6.8 and some forum posts said that 10.6.6 would be more stable than 10.6.8.

Posted 4 months ago #

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