Sorry to dig this post up but it answers 90% of my questions and the remaining 10% is on topic...

Anyway, as far as creating a dev environment for the typical LAMP environment goes: Has anyone written up a "best practices" type of checklist to making a copy of the environment on other hardware? Eg: Is it better to go the backup/restore route for the db? I'm quite new to mysql, but every other rdbms I've used doesn't easily allow for cross-platform dump/loads - or at least there is some "catch" to the process.

The rest seems somewhat trivial - moving/altering the apache config and the ubb directory with the php pages.

Good thing is, you can always do a practise run. make the backup, move the backup, test it.

Don't use the moment supreme to do your first test of the whole proces.

Well, when I test i just test with dummy data; but easiest thing to do to work off of board data would be to just follow a backup/restore procedure and just point your config files on the local server to the proper information to connect to its local db...

the only thing i always watch out for is the main difference in mysql on Windows vs Linux systems as regards table names. Out of the box, mysql on windows makes all the table names lower case. Linux preserves case.

since ubbt uses upper case in the table names, it can be a gotcha. so i always edit my 'my.cnf' file on the windows box (even if it's running WAMP) to NOT change table names to lower case. that way compatibility is maintained.