Most of my work is web development, often stand-alone reports. The production environment is always mod_perl installed on some *nix variant connecting to Oracle. But, the development environment often differs. Some places, I've worked on my on Linux box. Some places, I've been handed Exceed. Others, I used 4-6 telnet/ssh windows from my Win32 box to the development server.
This past week, I started a new contract, doing report redevelopment. (As a side note, I didn't know that Oracle9i has an embedded Apache server!) I was expecting to be told to use Exceed or some other emulator. So, I was surprised to hear that I should use Cygwin.
I've played with Cygwin before, but never seriously. I started setting things up and found the following:
- It's really cool to have your development windows and your testing windows both on and going against the same machine.
- Being able to reconfigure the Apache server without messing anyone else up rocks.
- Being able to download Oracle 9i Personal and having the complete environment under your control is amazing.
- Cygwin is extremely well put together.
- I can CVS all my source code. Using PVCS, I can use a remote repository that's shared with others.
- Transferring files between my Win32 box and my *nix development account is, well, not an issue.
- That annoying cut'n'paste crap that Exceed puts you through is gone.
If you haven't tried it out as a development environment, I heartily recommend you do so.
(Before anyone says anything, I am not recommending Cygwin as a production environment - just a development one. I understand the performance hit mod_perl takes under Cygwin.)
------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.
The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6
... strings and arrays will suffice. As they are easily available as native data types in any sane language, ... - blokhead, speaking on evolutionary algorithms
Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.
20031109 Edit by BazB: Changed title from 'Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin'
Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Nov 09, 2003 at 00:48 UTC
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For me, unix tools are a tremendous addition to the MS Windows system, whether from cygwin or elsewhere. It is a fine thing to have the bash shell running in a windows console. I rarely use windows, only have one machine running win95, and having a real shell makes the occasional necessity bearable.
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Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by sauoq (Abbot) on Nov 09, 2003 at 01:41 UTC
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Are you using Cygwin/XFree86 or just the console tools?
I've used the console stuff and it is definitely a breath of fresh air to have real tools available on Windows. I haven't tried the XFree port yet but I'd like to hear what experiences others have had. Our workstations group is looking for a replacement for Reflections X.
-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
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I haven't tried the XFree port yet but I'd like to hear what experiences others have had.
It works. X11 forwarding works, so you can ssh into
a *nix box and pull up GUI apps and display them on
your Windows system. However, last time I tried it
(which admittedly has been some months, so it may
have improved) it was not as smooth as could be
wanted, certainly not as smooth as a real *nix system.
Among other things, installation was mildly a pain
(more than for the console cygwin stuff), and rootless
mode wasn't supported (so, you get one big cygwin/xfree
window, with your X11 windows inside of it as if it
were an MDI app). The wm that came with was twm, which
is a tad bit on the minimalist side for my tastes.
Presumably you could compile and install a different
one. And stability left something to be desired -- I
had X11 hang or crash much more frequently than under
*nix. (I don't believe this was just the OS's
instability coming through, as it seemed worse than
that. The instability *may* have partly been what apps
I was running, however, notably freeciv, the Windows
port of which is not as well-maintained as could be
wished.)
However, as noted, this was some months ago, and things
may be much better now. I personally have getting a
more up-to-date version on my todo list, and I don't
think it would be a waste of your time to try out the
latest and greatest. The version I tried months ago
basically worked, so the current version may be quite
good. Also, rootless mode support may have been
checked in by the OS X people and may have found
its way over into cygwin, though I'm guessing.
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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Rootless mode is in fact supported, though it requires some command line options which must be added to the startup script by hand. I believe that they do not fully encourage rootless mode yet (still in beta stage or something), but I've had no problems with it.
If we didn't reinvent the wheel, we wouldn't have rollerblades.
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Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by graff (Chancellor) on Nov 09, 2003 at 15:35 UTC
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Someone needs to cite this, so I'll do it:
GNU Software for MS-Windows and MS-DOS, 2nd Edition (book with CD-ROM)
IMHO, it's worth $35 to support GNU and get a nice, easy-to-install, fully-packed distro of *nix tools for wintel. (Of course, you can look for the ftp mirrors and download it all at no cost, except the time you spend tracking down and fetching all those utility packages and docs).
I've worked with both the GNU kit (which I installed on my own windows boot partition at home) and Cygwin (which a co-worker had installed on some windows machines at the office). There are a few differences in their details, and it's probably just a matter of personal habits (or tendency to focus on certain details) that lead me to prefer GNU over Cygwin. YMMV. | [reply] |
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I rarely find the need for them, but when I need to interact with unix systems or interchange stuff with unix systems, these satisfy every need I've found so far, and they are so much quicker than the Cygwin equivalents.
Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Hooray!
Wanted!
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Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by allolex (Curate) on Nov 10, 2003 at 04:26 UTC
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I understand the point you are making, but I would like to take this opportunity to put in a good word for Codeweavers' Crossover Plugin/Office where development and testing are concerned. For a while now, Crossover Office has supported a Linux installation of Internet Explorer (not to mention Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Adobe Photoshop, Lotus Notes, and Quicken) which allows me to preview my web pages on my Linux system. The pages still look better in Mozilla (due to IE's interpretation of certain standards), but mod_perl suffers no performance loss. ;)
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Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by zby (Vicar) on Nov 10, 2003 at 11:03 UTC
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I had been using Linux pretty exclusively as my workstation. But now I work for a company requiring a Windows workstation. Cygwin was my last resort. The problem is the non trivial translation of Windows permissions to Unix, I constantly had problems at installation. The installator was setting, for some reason, null permissions for some files and other installation scripts checking -r to conclude the files were not existant. | [reply] [d/l] |
Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by cleverett (Friar) on Nov 15, 2003 at 09:51 UTC
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I use cygwin's rsync to back up Windows boxen to our Linux backup server. Screw spending $700 on network backup software. | [reply] |
Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 03, 2013 at 02:48 UTC
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BazB & Monks! Just began to use cygwin, haven't figured out (yet) how to import code from PVCS into cygwin. Do PVCS or cygwin offer any standard routines to migrate code from one to another?
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On the cygwin website, it says that you must rebuild native Linux applications from source if you want it to run on Windows.
This website states that PVCS is supported on Linux RH 9.0, and cygwin is based on Red Hat. So if you have access to the source code, perhaps you can try building it on cygwin, as you would other linux software packages.
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Re: OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin
by hieronymus (Scribe) on Nov 14, 2003 at 21:10 UTC
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I've been developing sys admin scripts and tools on cygwin for a little over two years now (primarily because my company's standard workstation is Win2K -> WinXP) and there is no way I would keep my sanity in tact without it! I just recently started using the XFree86 tools and wished I had started using them earlier!
I can work on my web server reports off site without any risk of harming mission critical servers or data...this list goes on...
-hieronymus | [reply] |
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