If you're primary use will be OSS development then you're best bet is to buy a cheap PC and throw Debian on it. I'd go with the testing branch, which, despite

If you're primary use will be OSS development then you're best bet is to buy a cheap PC and throw Debian on it. I'd go with the testing branch, which, despite the name, is very stable. In my experience it's a lot easier to use existing OSS code on Linux than it is on OSX. OSX is a lot better than Windows, but I found I spend a lot of time on OSX debugging weird library problems and trying to get dependencies installed. A common problem is that I'll be trying to build/install a library, but it'll have a prereq that isn't met because Apple included an ancient version of it. Fink and MacPorts help a bit, but at that point it you might as well just install Linux, since they're basically emulating the various Linux package management systems, but they don't integrate with the OS very well. On Debian I "apt-get install" the -dev package for the library I want to use, and everything works. And on the rare occasion a library isn't available through apt-get, building from source is almost always as easy as "./configure && make && sudo make install". Sometimes that'll work on OSX, sometimes it won't. In the meantime you might want to try Linux or OSX in VirtualBox first. Sounds like your VMWare installation might be broken.