Maria: Actually, they have something in reverse of what you want, meaning that running UNIX applications inside Windows. Have you tried with Cygwin? It allows UNIX applications to be built and run on Windows. The latest release contains lots of UNIX commands and applications, you just need to install by selecting Full category, took about 3GB disk space.
Sorry for the off-topic rambles, but could not resist. the mac laptops are nice, but nothing beats the MacPro tower with two quad core cpus. Connect two monitors out of the box, or four if you install additional video card. The machine is completely silent, btw. I run my trading software in winXP inside of QEMU, works fine including DHCP networking except if you want to set up more sophisticated networking you have to muck around on the command line. About the development environment - i think it is fine and getting better every year. Java just works, and if they are a bit behind in version number that just means more stability. I dont remember any time a java program not running there. The other essentials for me, R and postgres both run as well or better than on my old freebsd box.
Toshiba to ship laptops with OpenSolaris pre-installed: http://ostatic.com/blog/opensolaris-coming-to-toshiba-laptops-continuing-a-trend
Hearing rumours of IBM buying up SUN, any idea what this implies for OpenSolaris / Virtual Box? Thanks Maria
Only speculation, but I doubt that IBM would make too many disruptive changes any time soon. There is a huge installed base of Solaris / SPARC systems and money to be made in support /consulting etc. It would be bad business to p*ss off this market. Which should mean OpenSolaris will continue, as there seems no point in alienating the open source community. Unless IBM has some virtualization product (which I haven't heard of, but might exist) VirtualBox would seem to have a future. Maybe a strong future. The biggie will be Java, as IBM have their own JVM which is pretty good and Eclipse IDE. Sun have Netbeans IDE - also good. Maybe they will continue on with both for a time, but I would guess that at sometime in the future there would be consolidation. My guess is that a lot of this is to do with Java and the "enterprise space". On a personal note, I spent quite a few years as a contract developer and IBM were by far the professional outfit I ever encountered.
Why not use Linux and VirtualBox or VmWare, or Xen or .... No question about the future of Linux and almost certainly better driver support. Not saying that Solaris doesn't have some nice features such as Z filesystem and dtrace, but Linux is very good these days.
Investigation of Linux took a long time and some suprising information came to light: a number of flavours are "bleeding edge" and require frequent upgrading of which some are not painless - i.e. they require a total reinstall. Stability is another issue with these versions. VMware is only supported on a limited number of Linux flavours - it may run on others but you are out on your own. In the end we have settled on CentOS 5.3 with VMware. Sofar it is running fine on the development platform but it will be some time yet before migrating with the production platform. And yes, I know: it does not have the latest "gizmo's" but it is a very stable environment and is used for a number of commercial servers and has a very good track record there (one of the best). Maria