Test Wordpress on Local machine with Ubuntu or Windows.

[Geek-9pm]

This link was find while using the Ubuntu demo DVD. Strange how when you try something a littel different yhou learn new things.

Top 8 Best LocalTesting Environments for WordPress ** footnoete

Many site admins take advantage of these environments where they can do thorough testing before committing changes to a site. If you’ve ever activated a new plugin or upgraded to a new version of WordPress only to find errors on your site, you will know the importance of testing first.
There are many ways you can set up a test environment, but the easiest by far are localhost environments or cloning your site on your existing web hosting account.

He goes on to recomend this article for first-time wordpress users.
How to Install XAMPP and WordPress Locally on PC/Windows
The tool he mentions is XAMPP and can also work with Ubuntu.

Myself, I have only use Instant Word Press on Windows. 
Anybody here use any local environments tools  for testing Wordpress? 

** Here a 'local environment' means a software thing that lets you us Apache, MySQl and PHP on a machine that is not really aservier. It can be used for testing some server-side appliocations without acually going live on the Internet. Microsft has something like that  but not considered here.

[TheWaffle]

I have a virtual machine running I run a local webserver on.  I make any changes to the software in the virtual machine, then I manually push the changes.

One avenue I have not yet tried, but it is possible is rsync.

rsync can handle both the files and the database(s).