best cheap easy setup for initial development
patrickg-zill: VirtualBox (free from virtualbox.org) running on top of whatever Windows, Mac-x86 or Linux system you have.Debian or Centos as the operating system that you run as a VM inside VirtualBox.You should be able to easily install Python, Ruby, TCL, Lisp, etc. on either platform for development language; Apache or NGINX or Lighttpd as the web server; Emacs or Eclipse or whatever as the editor.