I just learned how to do this! If anyone's interested I could write out the steps for doing this on Ubuntu.
I've been toying with the idea of offering managed dev environment using this. Some pain points it would solve:
-no new installation/configuration when you buy a new laptop
-let an outsourced sysadmin take care of annoying things like installing java, adding environment variables, installing mobile app sdk's etc.
-environment is accessible anywhere you have Internet access
The ultimate benefit is: spend less time installing things and more time developing.
I probably don't know enough about UNIX to do this myself, but I think it's a worthy idea.
It'd be difficult to trust the admin in that case. Same reason you see instructions for how to shrink the official ubuntu ami down to something smaller for a micro instance instead of a blog that say "here, mount this one I already shrunk"
IMO the problem you will run into with that is that most developers seem to heavily customize their dev environments. I'd love to be wrong about that though, because there are times when I'm setting up a new one when I'd love to be able to pay someone to do it for me.
I've been toying with the idea of offering managed dev environment using this. Some pain points it would solve: -no new installation/configuration when you buy a new laptop -let an outsourced sysadmin take care of annoying things like installing java, adding environment variables, installing mobile app sdk's etc. -environment is accessible anywhere you have Internet access
The ultimate benefit is: spend less time installing things and more time developing.
I probably don't know enough about UNIX to do this myself, but I think it's a worthy idea.