Justin saw this article and recommended that I take another look at Docker. He especially recommended that I do the docker tutorial, and I did. It seems pretty nice.
I told Justin:
It seems very nice but I’m going to hold off until it runs on OSX. To run it now I’d have to run it inside a virtualbox VM and I don’t see the point. Besides I can’t imagine getting networking and file sharing working from way in there.
One advantage of docker seems to be the downloadable premade environments. This reminded me that virtualbox has them, too.
Reading another article on docker, I found this explanation of the difference between docker and :
Virtualbox has a lot of overhead as each image uses its own kernel and file system. This isn’t the case with docker - containers share the same operating system as the host, and when possible, the same binaries and libraries. It’s possible to run hundreds of containers on a single docker host.
An instance of docker running in OSX, if I understand correctly, could only run OSX, not some other OS. And docker in linux can only run linux.
I use virtualbox to run linux server images in OSX. I can develop for linux on my Mac.
Currently docker sounds like a very useful tool for someone developing on linux for linux.