Well I use UNIX too often to wish to use cmd.exe or similar whilst on Windows. I keep Cygwin to make my life a little easier. If you do the same, don’t forget that the bundled XServer will give one a better experience than just a plain vanilla cygwin terminal. If you’ve installed the full kit, make use of it!
Make sure you start cygwin with windows admin rights (right click and Run As admin), you’ll get much further :-) Then just start X.
$ startxwin.bat
startxwin.bat – Starting on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003Or
$ sh startxwin.sh
The end of my .xinitrc brings up an xterm automatically
# start some nice programs
exec xterm -e /usr/bin/bash -l
The xterm with colours is a nice touch too. If you haven’t, set an alias
$ alias ls=”ls –color”
If you’re using a dynamic scripting language like Groovy, you don’t have to crank up your favourite but RAM guzzling IDE. You can just
$ gvim &
$ xemacs &
or whatever takes your fancy.
Yes you can do as I do, have a dual boot system with Ubuntu as an option. But I’m happy to work on Windows Vista too (though it’s definitely not as lean as Linux. Out of the box, my Ubuntu starts faster, connects to the network faster and surfs faster. And if you do programming outside of a VM, well it is the platform with better API’s too :-) ).
But whilst on Windows, don’t just use Cygwin, go the whole hog, run a lightweight virtualization package like coLinux. Combined with a Linux distro like Debian or/and RedHat you can use the local Cygwin XServer as your display (though VNC works just as well).
As a Linux (or even a multi concurrent) server you won’t need too much memory and you can test your product builds if you deliver to both Windows and Linux
For coLinux, make sure the driver is installed and running
C:\colinux>colinux-daemon.exe –status-driver
Cooperative Linux Daemon, 0.6.4
Compiled on Mon May 29 22:19:09 2006checking if the driver is installed
current state: 4 (fully initialized)
current number of monitors: 1
current linux api version: 10
current periphery api version: 15
and start her up
$ cat colinuxALX.sh
./colinux-daemon kernel=vmlinux cobd0=Debian-3.0r2.ext3-mit-backports.1gb root=/
dev/cobd0 eth0=tuntap,TAP coLinux bridge
If your network is working (/sbin/ifconfig) then once logged in as root, or you, send an X app to your windows desktop. Amazed? After vmware, I was.
colinux:~# export DISPLAY=192.168.0.1:0
colinux:~# xeyes &
colinux:~# [1] 268
Yep your Linux server X Application is running on your desktop side by side with your Windows (in my case Vista) applications. And you can “ssh -l ‘userAccount’ from your cygwin terminal into your Linux. Once going, just use your imagination.
Food for thought :-)
