I've tried various ways (cygwin, andLinux, vmware, even remote X etc) to get a mixed linux/windows working environment. I think I've almost found the nicest solution, certainly it is looking good so far.
Seamless
A nice mix of linux and windows. How is it done? The host is kubuntu, a desktop environment that I am appreciating more and more. The windows boxes are running in windows 2000 under the open source version of VirtualBox. Why Windows 2000? Well if I only need windows running to be able to tweek access permissions on the file server and check how things look in ie6 then windows 2000 is all I need. Windows 2000 runs blazingly fast, by modern standards it is a bloat-free o/s.
VirtualBox is set up in 'Seamless' mode which means the windows desktop background disappears and the windows windows appear on my kde desktop. Windows 2000 has the virtualbox applications installed and hence I can cut and paste between systems.
For the kind of linux/rails development I am doing at the moment it is much nicer to be running on linux than windows. NetBeans rails integration runs much more smoothly, rspec tests run many times faster, networking is seamless, it's just better all round.
Note that in the DOS box I am looking at my linux home directory, accessed via VirtualBox's shared folder mechanism.
I'm liking VirtualBox more than vmware. When I tried running linux in vmware on windows I found it annoying to have to wait two minutes for the machine state to be saved when I was closing down my pc to go home. VirtualBox under linux is doing it in seconds. Startup time for snapshots is good too.
I've set VirtualBox up with a permutation of networking that lets me log into the windows domain network from Windows 2000 as the VirtualBox instance appears as a pc on our network. By default it appeared behind a NAT translation and windows networking (Netbios and all that ancient stuff) was broken.
Incidently, trying to install windows 2000 on VirtualBox I kept getting end endless reboot loop. The fix for this is in the VirtualBox user manual. Apparently when they wrote the windows 2000 setup program they didn't allow for 2GHz dual core processors and virtual disks so the setup program crashes due to a timing condition. So much has changed in the last eight years.
Peter's Moblog
