Actually, I find using VMWare Fusion to be a great way to use all the good dev tools available on the Mac -- SourceTree git client, CSSEdit, BBEdit, etc -- whil

Actually, I find using VMWare Fusion to be a great way to use all the good dev tools available on the Mac -- SourceTree git client, CSSEdit, BBEdit, etc -- while actually developing on the same Linux environment you'll use in production. The key is to build and install the latest version of Netatalk on the Linux VM, and then mount its filesystem on the Mac via AFP. Netatalk has a config option (-admingroup) that lets members of an arbitrary group mount a volume with root privileges, which is very handy for development. (Netatalk has plenty of bugs[1], but works well enough for development.) I've tried to get this same setup with CIFS (Samba), as well as sshfs. However, apps like TextMate or CSSEdit freak out with permission errors (even if you set up ACLs or something so that you really have write permission, the Mac apps don't believe you do). Netatalk is the only magic sauce I have found that lets you mount a Linux server's disks as volumes that your Mac sees as simple writable volumes, but where you actually have root privs as far as the Linux box is concerned. Not something I'd use on a real server, but great for development. -- [1]: the most insanely annoying one being that it currently can't serve the root volume; you have to configure it to make /etc, /var, etc available as separate shares