I'm jumping into this thread quite lately, but here are my $.03 CDN. Mark Fowler wrote: > > 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.
An alternative to this, is to use VNC or TightVNC to connect to a spare Windows computer somewhere. I do this quite often to connect from my Linux system at work to a spare Windows system at home, across the VPN. I'm sure there are people who set up a local spare box, that developers can share if they need IE to test a webpage or convert an Office document or whatever > 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. I've been using VMWare for years with great success. Anything with a >=400 Mhz processor and 256MB should be fine; all computers from the last 3 years have >these specs, and RAM is cheap. By the way, if you originally tried Vmware2, try >Vmware 3 as I found it a lot faster. Also make sure your system is tweaked: HD is in >DMA mode, recompiled kernel, etc, etc. These days, I run an average of 3 VMWare >sessions at any given time: 2 linux, and one Win32. I toggle between Win98 and WinXP, >but do run all 4 images simulaneously (plus my normal apps) on occasion. ATA100 or >SCSI does help though. > 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... I've done this in the past, and we have developers that use this method as well. > d) WINE on Linux. I've not had much success with this, but if it's a > particular application you might have success. Doesn't work all so super hot for iexplore, winword, excel, and so forth. It works fine for quicktime, windows media player, starcraft, winamp, winzip, notepad, minesweeper, and a lot of other things; see winehq.com for an application database. I have some (trippy) screenshots of VNC, VMWare, VNC+VMWare, and Wine in action over at: http://www.nyetwork.org/wim/screenshots/ -- Regards, Wim Kerkhoff, Software Engineer Merilus, Inc. -|- http://www.merilus.com Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
