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[Nobbie]

if that's possible or recommended at all?

Of course you may use VirtualBox. But (honestly), I would buy a cheap desktop at Ebay and run a dedicated server there. I dont know, where you live, but in Germany you will get "second hand PCs" for 50,-€ or less. Linux does not require modern hardware, many distributions are running flawlessly on old hardware environments. A linux testserver does (by far) not require hardware ressources like Windows or OSX.

An old Pentium III (or similar) with 1Gb RAM (even 512MB will do it) and a 50GB HDD is Ok.

[webeno]

I just can't get my head around how I would write website code with it. I'm developing an online app and I'm the type of guy who likes apps that have a nice gui... so, if I wanted to write PHP code for example, I'd have to do that on that second hand PC, not on my mac that I like doing it on... plus I already have a laptop, a monitor next to it, then my huge mac... where do I put that PC?

[webeno]

Well, I did try virtualbox, and it was a pain - mind you, I'm an absolute beginner on linux but after installing debian, i just couldn't make it to share files...

Finally I ended up downloading MAMP and it just runs super!