I miss Linux for more than a year now. After my first company, I have been in the companies which main development OS is Windows. It has been good experience to develop applications in Linux environment. It was robust, the compilation and the performance of the components like the application server is better than Windows. (IMHO)

In order to refresh my Linux knowledge, I installed a virtual linux distro in my Windows machine. Thanks to VMWare for their VMPlayer and Virtual Appliance.

Here are the requirements and steps to run linux in your Windows environment.
1. You need a VMPlayer. You can download the player on this site.
2. You need an appliance for your Linux ditro. I used the CentOS 5 since this disto has features and updates similar to RedHat Enterprise Linux. You can download the appliance at this site.

This appliance is a server edition and in order to have a GUI or X installed you need to use the ff commands.

First you can see all the yum groups available with the command:

yum grouplist

You can install X and Gnome or KDE like this:

yum groupinstall “X Window System” “GNOME Desktop Environment”

or

yum groupinstall “X Window System” “KDE (K Desktop Environment)”