Best practices for setting up LAMP development environment

"I would use a VM and use the same distribution that the target host will use. This could eliminate a lot of frustrations later. As far as the VM and the netbook goes, I thought the whole point of the ""NETbook"" was that local storage was only a cache and the bulk of the work was to be dome remotely in the ""cloud?""

You could find an old beater desktop to setup as a temporary host and develop on that. If you make your site work there, then moving it to a host will only improve performance, and if you are using shared hosting (most people do) then the results from the old machine will more closely match what you can expect from your hosting service anyways."