I have a few Mac OS X systems, in particular a MacBookPro that my job gave me. 2.33 GHZ w/ 2GB of memory Core2Duo. It's a fine and dandy machine and I'm real happy with the performance of VirtualBox on this system. Since my job is really about facilitating running Java on open source OS's like Ubuntu what I need is for a virtualized OS to feel very responsive. But I also need to compile OpenJDK source on that OS.

A rundown of installing and configuring NFS services on Ubuntu.

NTP is a TCP/IP protocol for synchronizing time over a network. Basically a client requests the current time from a server, and uses it to set its own clock.

Ubuntu forums section for running their OS on Apple hardware.