Creating a Business Objects XI development environment running in a VMWare virtualized Red Hat Linux machine
With the wide adoption and availability of virtualization technology, and with smart companies like VMWare willing to give away free versions of their expensive products…
Virtualization technology is now available as freeware.
This is great news for us as developers. We Business Objects developers are now able to create inexpensive and clonable BOXI development environments.
VMWare now offers a free version of their virtual server software, thus enabling developers to run multiple virtual computers in their development environment. With low cost of memory (RAM) and hard disk storage, most developers already have hardware powerful enough to run several virtual servers with good performance.
On our laptops.
The officially supported Linux OS for Business Objects XI is Redhat Enterprise 4.0. What many developers might not realize is that there is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise 4 built from the same sources as the RedHat Enterprise build.
The "free" RedHat is called CentOS.
It's kind of humorous. CentOS is not "officially" able to mention on their website that they are RedHat compatible (due to legal reasons).
But they are…
On their site they speak of Red Hat in "abstract" terms And the version numbering is parallel between RedHat and CentOS. CentOS 4.5 is currently the latest and greatest version of the RedHat Enterprise 4 family.
Here's what they say on the CentOS site:
"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free. CentOS is now accepting donations via PayPal, please click the button for more information."
Pretty funny. If that doesn't bring a grin to your face… nothing will.
"prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor"
That's great. 
More details to follow in future posts.
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