Greetings,
I run a local VirtualBox VM on my Windows 7 machine for development. I would
never consider such a thing for production. It is possible? Yes, I would
think so. Should you do it? Not on a machine which is being used as a
desktop computer, in my opinion.
Have you considered an external host provider (such as digitalocean.com)? If
your IT guy could set up DNS entries to point to a hosted VM, your small
library might be well accommodated by cheaper plans (like digitalocean's
$10/month plan). Compare that against the cost of replacement hardware. It's
about the same, if not cheaper.
Then, follow the package installation instructions at:
http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Debian (the recommended OS of
preference)
(or http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_ubuntu_-_packages -- I'm
partial to Ubuntu myself)
It would be relatively simple to maintain.
Plus, you then provide external access at no extra cost, and can likely get
any further assistance you need more readily and remotely from one of many
Koha support providers. :)
Just my take on your situation.
GPML,
Mark Tompsett
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I am wondering what the purpose of one particular command line code is:
sudo a2enmod rewrite && sudo a2ensite koha

http://www.penguin-soft.com/penguin/man/8/a2enmod.html
a2enmod is a command to enable an Apache module. You can achieve the same thing by editing /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncommenting the line for the rewrite module:

LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so

Note that this is enabled by default, so shouldn't be necessary anyway.
a2ensite creates a symlink from your site's actual configuration file to the directory that Apache's actually looking in. I have no idea why they decided to do it that way, and isn't the way that Mac OS X Server employs Apache. If you've configured your site via Server Admin, this step is irrelevant, too.