Giving Up On A MAMP Stack

I've given up on trying to get a MAMP stack on my local Mac Pro. As beefy as machine as it is, it's not Linux. First, apache didn't work out of the box on OS X. Then, while working on image module, I found out that OS X's PHP doesn't come with GD. (I won't even mention my issues with ruby.)

So I'm going to spend more money on proprietary software (VirtualBox didn't work), most likely VMWare's Fusion so I can run a virtualized instance (or three) of Linux locally. It will take less time, behave the way I expect it to and be a breeze to update, thanks to apt.