Drupal 7.x

I have drupal set up and running my website.
I want to change the design but I would like to work with a complete copy of drupal so that I don't mess up the live site.
what is the easiest way to do this?

Last month my pc and notebook died and i took the opportunity to strengthen my setup.
A couple of weeks were spent on learning (ubuntu) linux to create a portable server on virtualbox. I had to be able to patch and i wanted to learn to use drush to minimize the time spent on downloading and updating.
Although I am not yet at the stage where i can patch, I am finalizing a multisite setup.

My installation steps have always been:

Hello there,

Does anyone know any list of shared hosting services who supports Drupal? Any special requirements?
Thanks.

Jurgen

For my volunteering website, I want the frontpage to have a block with a text box "I am passionate about...", website visitor will makes an entry into the textbox and hit enter (maybe despam it up with reCAPTCHA) but i want the visitor to be able to do this without logging in or having to create an account. Then when the user hits enter, he will be redirected back to the front page and the block saying "thanks for your entry". On the backend i will administer it by "publishing" the node, and it will show in a view block randomly.

Hello everyone,

i want a Drupal Expert that he can intergrate my drupal social network into my flash design, i mean i need drupal some social network feature in my flash design like

1. User profile
2. Blog
3. Forum

Please contact me at meena.prahlad@gmail.com, if you really know how its work??

Thank you
Prahlad

I am converting a module to D7. All of the queries are fine except one:

    $sql = "SELECT COUNT(n.nid) FROM {node} n WHERE n.type = ':type' ";
    $exist_type = db_result(db_query($sql, array(':type' => $type)));

Before you ask, yes, $type is "article".