On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Medi Montaseri wrote: > Stuart Frew wrote: > > > Ideally you would have linux( or what ever) on every developers > > machine but sometimes you don't get the choice. > > Oh "the choice" is easy....just come in on a weekend and install > linux on your box. Don't tell IT. That's all.
I think the "don't get a choice" is more to do with that you require access to some application that requires MS windows to run. This is typically Exchange, Word, and most importantly iexplore for testing the website you are developing. There are solutions to this: a) Terminal Server. Get one Windows box running terminal server (the server version of w2k ships with it by default iirc) and install rdesktop[1] on your desktop Linux machines. This means you can all remotely open up a window to a Windows desktop on your linux box. It's reasonably fast but you will be limited to 256 colours and animations will be slow. b) VMWare (and similar) that allows you to run an emulated Windows computer on your real computer. I tried the trial version of this but I found it was taking up too much resources on my desktop. OTOH, I never had any problem with it and it worked flawlessly, and my desktop machine is quite slow by modern standards. c) VMWare the other way round - run it on Windows and have emulated linux boxen. The advantage of this is that you'll be able to quickly switch between a range of development environments, roll back changes etc. etc. I've never personally tried this solution... d) WINE on Linux. I've not had much success with this, but if it's a particular application you might have success. [a] requires purchase of one w2k server licence and one computer (though you might have one that has some spare processing time) and will free up the Windows licences for the desktop machine. [b] and [c] require one VMWare per machine. IIRC that's quite expensive. [d] is the cheapest option, and you might even be able to dump your existing windows licence. Regards. Mark. [1] http://www.rdesktop.org/ -- s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t->Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/ ){for(0..30){$|=print$t->Tgoto(cm,$_,$y)." $w";select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}