Linux at Work

About a month ago I wrote a post about using Linux in the workplace (it was Ubuntu, of course). I set up Ubuntu on a virtual machine and used it for coding instead of Windows. I still had to use some programs in Windows because I use two monitors and I could only figure out how to use one of them with the virtual machine. No problems really, although it sucked when I wanted to move a window from one monitor to the other.

However, I've now been moved to another department. Although they still develop for a LAMP stack, their code is much more complicated than the one I was using and I can't run it in a virtual machine without the system running out of memory (even with 128MB of RAM allocated to PHP alone).
My first idea was to use Samba to mount my network drive under Linux and continue development from there. Unfortunately, this didn't work and I'm not sure why. I remember doing it a while back when I first set up the virtual machine, but it's possible that some configuration settings changed, maybe the versions of Samba, who knows.

So now I'm back to developing LAMP applications under Windows. job_satisfaction--. And I'm surprised at the change. I feel...inefficient. Even missing things like symlinks means that I have to do more work. I don't have direct access to anything, so I can't play with settings in memcached or Apache to figure out what needs to be done.
I'm actually somewhat surprised that I feel this way. Originally I felt that it wouldn't be much different, or that I'd even be worse off giving up some of the bells and whistles that come with the Windows versions of things (TortoiseSVN has no equal in Linux, at least none that I've found). Ultimately though, I find the freedom in using Linux is so much better. Developing for a LAMP stack in Windows I feel like there is a ball and chain around my leg.