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Combine that with Terminator and Cygwin and it's almost like the real thing.

Run these commands (or put them in a script):

ctags *
gtags
htags -Fan

It will create a ~\HTML folder with all the function/variables cross-referenced. Open the file index.html or mains.html in your browser. If your not running Linux, I think these utilities are included in cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/

Enjoy,

Has to work inside of Windows on an automatic schedule;

I suggest that you look into cygwin. When I had to use an NT box as my main development box, I got cygwin and was happy to have bash and most of the standard bin utils. If I had to use a window box again, this would be one of the first things I install.

Win32 doesn't support forking, but the NT kernel does. For that matter, by far most of the expense of starting a Win32 process on Windows is due to Win32 subsystem overhead, including compatibility database lookups, not the kernel. SFU processes (that belong to the POSIX subsystem) and native processes (that belong to no subsystem) are MUCH cheaper, and incidentally support true kernel level copy-on-write fork.

Cygwin doesn't use the kernel's fork support because Cygwin is built upon on Win32. SFU can because it runs parallel to Win32.

Doh. the relevant API FAQ.

Even things like Cygwin only emulate [fork() on Windows] with threads.

One presumes that he has been required to surrender his hardware (all of it) to the authorities for the installation of the tracking software which phones home to indicate what he's doing (at whatever level of granularity it tracks such things).

He could probably get away with VMWare or the like running Linux under Windows, but that would just run the risk of landing him in jail.

His best bet is Cygwin, the suite of open source tools for Windows that includes everything you need to essentially subvert a Windows desktop and make it think it's a Unix-like OS. It's not 100% perfect, but it's a far cry better than pure Windows. I regularly use a Windows laptop with X running under it, ssh to my office with X-forwarding and several gnome-terminals running on my work desktop.

Other than that, the only native Windows apps I use are Firefox and Thunderbird, so it's often hard to tell what OS it actually is.

You do realize that Cygwin has rsync & ssh available for Windows, right?

Where did I say Firefox is all open source projects?

"Unfortunately, that is the direction open source is headed."

This is referring to the attitude of the open-source teams, and it does seem to be going the same way the Mozilla teams are going. I do believe the open source teams will get to the point of telling people to fix the bugs themselves. Actually, it may already be the attitude of some open source teams. Allegedly, some have already used the line "If you don't like it, fix it yourself." No I am not trolling or trying to flamebait but if this is indeed the attitude of the Firefox teams "or open-source in general" then it needs to change if open-source is to grow. On the other hand, those who call it "open-sores" or Linux "Linsux" are simply immature.

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2000-06/msg00613.h tml
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/linux/locutus/archives/ is-open-source-complacent-16924

I have given suggestions for features to closed-source developers and every time they have stated they will implement it when there is enough of a demand for it. They also have seem to take bug reports.

http://www.cygwin.com/

You can download it here. Screenshots here.

Could it simply be that the compiler they are using doesn't support it?

I use Cygwin daily at work, as I cannot dual-boot to Linux. It is more than enough for my work, but for the general public, it's packaging system is sadly lacking in bells and whistles, and the available library is way short of your objective.

Nevertheless, isn't it a good start?

When I'm working on a problem on the computer, I'm physically in the room, but my mind is in some abstract space such that the height of the ceiling is really irrelevant. Perhaps they should do a study on the effects of monitor size. I might feel more constrained using a 14" monitor. Or operating systems. Unless I can install cygwin, I feel really constrained in Windows.

"There's nothing to compare as long as Linux operating systems got nothing compared to the Windows Device Manager. Windows > Linux."

Perhaps you could try having a balanced viewpoint? Believe it or not, little things like the lack of centralized device management DO bug the living starch out of your average user. They can barely get around a Windows machine and you want them to hunt all over creation for their device options? Even Macs have a centralized control panel!

Ubuntu has been helping Linux make great strides in user friendliness. But some of the core usability issues have gone all of 15 years without being repaired. Instead we concern ourselves over Beryl vs. Aero. Who frickn' cares? Neither one is going to make my computer do what I want it to do any better.

P.S. Cygwin - For those times when you can't use a real operating system.

Indeed, X11 may have problems. There're more things - handling disconnection/reconnection in wifi environments, etc. But they are fixable. Hell, they may even need to release X12 to fix them, but the theorically perfect environment is that.

"Google OS"? I laught at those OSes. With X, you can setup a big remote server that serves a heavy ubuntu desktop and let users use the applications remotely. It's powerful enougth to allow to run an app both locally and remotely - the UI can be displayed anywhere, X fixes those details transparently.

Ordered in increasing levels of system modification...

PsTools (not exactly the same, but you can rename "PsList" to "ps" and get much the same information, and the other "PsTools" function similarly to programs described in the article)
Cygwin
Ubuntu.

http://x.cygwin.com/

bzzt, try again.

Yeah, I endorse all of those, especially PDFCreator. Also, Inkscape, Audacity, and VLC.

It's specialized, but if you need a UNIX-like enviroment under Windows, Cygwin is wonderful.

> The INSTALLER itself is GPL'd, and it's considerably harder to find the source code for it on the website.

http://cygwin.com/setup/

There used to be a source-only package for the cygwin installer. It seems to have vanished from the installer's list, so this was indeed tricky to track down again. This is a packaging bug for the installer, not a a conspiracy.

As for clamwin and cdrdao, both of them are hosted on sourceforge.

You mean like the equivalent of "tabbed" desktops? One for my video encoding folders and related apps, one for the video game I'm playing and its forums/cheat sites, one for my music directory and winamp? That does sound kind of cool.

It's very cool. In fact it's too cool, once you get used to it you can never go back. Fortunately you can replace window's desktop with a real window manager. Add in Cygwin in a Terminator window and it's almost tolerable.

In this case, the internet provides an example of how to deal with problems like this: you route around it.

Cygwin introduced managed mounts specifically to enable developers to deal with issues like this. Using managed mounts can be a bother, but isn't nearly as annoying as not being able to cross-compile at all.

No shit. My Vista Ultimate system uses nearly 1GB RAM at startup, and I don't have many services running or apps installed, since nothing I have works on Vista yet..

At work we decided that having a couple of developers running Vista from day one would the best way to ensure our compatibility. Sounded like a great idea till I drew that particular short straw...

let's face it, the windows shell is ancient and pales compared to Bash.

Octave is fairly easy to run on windows via http://www.cygwin.com/ also.

Calculators like the HP-48 & the TI-89 are essentially tiny laptops running math software. My TI-89 software reminds me a lot of MATLAB. You'll have more time to "explore math" if you push aside the toys, and load up the ThinkPad w/ cygwin, octave, & gnuplot.

http://www.cygwin.com/ (if you're not running Linux)
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/

It's not like someone's going to ask you to turn in your calculator mesh graph of some x,y,z fn.

About sh et all: Cygwin. Has ssh, too, and X if you install it. Still, the laptop-to-desktop thing is already built into windows, in the form of Terminal Services. Enable "remote desktop connections" on the desktop, and then run the program "mstsc" (MicroSoft Terminal Services Client) to connect to it. Basically a proprietary VNC, but works without installing anything, which is a plus.

I would recommend Cygwin as the best solution. Cygwin is the bridge that provides access to much of the bulk that makes linux attractive on a desktop (GNU utilities, mainly) with the ease of use that you're used to (keeping Windows).

Unless you have some particular need where you really need a linux OS (busy web server, robust firewall, etc), you'll find that you are better off sticking with Windows. Cygwin will allow you to access most of the benefits of unix, including Xwindows if you're into that sort of thing. Most of the basic linux apps you're looking for will run fine with Cygwin.

I have numerous windows machines and only two linux machines. One is a RAID array, the other is the house workhorse (ssh/ftp/web/rsync server and firewall). Both linux machines are headless.

Windows may have numerous shortcomings, but on the desktop there's nothing linux really has to offer.

ant.

Like MS incorporating a "Linux mode" for either "migrating" Linux source code to Windows, or just a reverse "Wine" (Line-ux, anyone?) that runs Linux apps with a (secret) Linux -> Windows API.

Like, say, Cygwin?

It's not exactly the same as WINE (Linux software has to be built from source under Cygwin before it can be used), but since most Linux software is open source, that's usually not a problem.

The other advantage is that Java and C++ can be had for free with nice helpful IDEs. The Eclipse CDT (http://www.eclipse.org/ ) with cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) provides a fairly full IDE (and you can tailor it's key interface to EMACS :-) ). Eclipse also looks to be a fair Java IDE and there is also netbeans (http://www.netbeans.org/).

As a book I would suggest one I have enjoyed using in its online form, Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel (http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP 2e.html). It has the advantage that there is also a second volume that takes you into using more advanced features (fancy templating, STL, and some more complicated patterns) that they can look into or you could use as a follow on.

Can't be done... if you let real programmers see windows multimedia code then the holes will become public. The worst thing that MS can do is let out source, then we would see a flood of sploits that would all be posted on every bb from here to China! They are trying to be good guys by letting us change hardware, but letting the horse out of the barn could sink them. All they will allow is documented access to binary based functions, if you know how the function is coded then you can exploit it and create holes...sometimes this happens anyway but you do not get to see why. DirectX is well documented and quite usable but knowing Microsoft there are most likely back doors and leaks just waiting to hose the registry and OS. It might even be possible to create a virtual machine within the code then God forbid run other OS code directly within Windows like a DirectX enabled version of linux something like gilding the turd!

Sounds like you have become a victim of proprietary technology lock-in.

``but they also need to find suitable replacements for everything.'' ...because the software, APIs, etc. are all proprietary and tied to Windows.

``Visual Studio?''

Proprietary and tied to Windows.

``Learn other editors (vi/emacs), IDEs, debuggers and compilers (gcc?).''

Cross-platform versions of these exist on Windows, too. You could have been using them, instead of the Windows-specific stuff.

``The windows APIs we're used to? Gone.'' ...and good riddance. Welcome to the APIs that virtually every operating system _except_ Windows supports.

``The widgets (winforms/winfx/whatever)? Gone. The frameworks? Gone.''

Same as above.

``C#? Learn another language.''

You don't have to: there's DotGNU Portable.NET and Mono, both of which support C#.

``Scripting languages you know? Learn perl instead.'' ...or any of the multitude of scripting languages that are available on *nix systems. Many of these languages are available for Windows, too.

``SQL Server? Learn another DB inside out.''

You can use standard SQL on any compliant database. Database-independent programming interfaces exist for various programming languages.

If the transition to GNU/Linux (although the same applies to other *nix systems, like OpenBSD, Solaris, or OS X) seems too large a step, you could take a number of smaller steps first, e.g. use cross-platform software on Windows: Firefox, OpenOffice.org, MySQL, Emacs, gcc, Eclipse, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. etc. etc. You can also get a *nix environment on Windows by installing Cygwin.

It's also apples and oranges. RedHat server versions are comparable to Windows 2003, plus MS Office with the built-in OpenOffice, plus SNMP services, plus a print server, plus an industrial grade mail and webmail and IMAP server, plus a backup server with the built-in Amanda system, plus an industrial grade file server, plus industrial grade firewalls and security tools, plus good CD and DVD ripping sftware, and you don't have to buy additional client licenses if you have more than 25 clients. Moreover, almost all of RedHat server tools are available free as part of the CentOS distribution, if you don't want the commercial level of support and would rather use the tools free. I've actually used CentOS to demonstrate RedHat tools, before urging a client to go ahead and buy a licensed RedHat system in order to get that commercial grade of support after my contract is ver.

No, where the original poster got messed up was in trying to run commerical style software on an open source system. QT licensing is the same cost as several weeks of on-site consulting time, and should frankly be replaced in most projects with a simple web interface for portability. The Embedded Linux software is very customized, and very project specific: that's why it costs so much. Rewriting everything in C# is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of: it's a Microsoft written language, it's *designed* to frce you to use proprietary tools, and it's a Java wannabe. If these folks had been clueful, they'd have rewritten in plain C for speed and portability, or C++ for object oriented code, or actual Java for the write-once, run-anywhere advantages. But writing anything in C# that can be avoided. And the only reason to use Qt, and its licensing, is to allow you to keep your source code unavailable.

The CygWin license cost quoted is misleading as well. The only license for CygWin that costs that much is if you want to use CygWin to publish binaries without providing source code. The licensing is described at http://www.cygwin.com/licensing.html.

This original poster was basically trying to build a closed source environment, and paying the premium to insist on keeping their environment closed. Of course that will be expensive! It's not taking advantage of the open nature of the systems at all.

Err... How about Cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/ ?

CrossOver Mac will be the very best way to run your Windows applications on your Intel based Mac.

Download GNU tar for Windows via Cygwin.
tar --tape-length=4900000 -cvMf backup.tar Folder_To_Backup/

When you are prompted to change media burn the file backup.tar to the first DVD (removing it from its current location), then continue. This will create a new file of the same name (backup.tar), which will actually be part 2. Burn this to DVD and so on, labeling the DVDs accordingly.

To extract:
tar -xvMf /cygdrive/[dvd drive leter]/backup.tar

Where are my mod points when I need them? +10. Mac OS X (10.3 at least) is stable performer. Not ideal - but over all Okay. Unix side of theirs is quite compatible with BSD.

Most of the Linux stuff I did compiled and worked w/o any problems on Mac OS X. I often used my iBook as additional portability test bed.

It's still more Open Source than Windows.

That's especially looks true when one compares Fink with the bastard CygWin or SFU. Under Fink I had no problems at all. CygWin with it's funny on-the-fly conversions (between Unix-way and Windows-way doing things) never stop me surprising.

On-topic. The article actually surprised me. Linux just reached mainstream - and journalists already try to send it back to nerd's underground. Or it's probably just change of target: before the very same kind of journalists claimed for whole decade that Apple is dead. It's just now they have more scapegoats for the cheap shot journalism. In the end, no way I would even consider informative the article filled so carelessly with lots of technical info - but without any decent references. The sentences like "[...] flip this switch, it'll unpack itself [...]" just highlight that the guy never left his desk for real IT back rooms.

Vista is for home users . USERS . I operate a microwave , while being completely unaware of it's innerworkings . This is what a user of a PC should be like .

1) Most home users do not use an actual backup utility . They just copy stuff , and curse and spit every 4 years when the HD crashes .
2) An integrated web browser is not a bad thing . And considering the fact that you complain that Vista doesn't play DVDs , I don't see your point .
3) Windows Firewall is no worse than any other SOFTWARE FIREWALL . You want a real firewall ? Get a box .
4) Yeah , the DVD thing sucks . But then again , it means that a user actually gets to install a non-ms product .
5) Normal people doesn't really need file permissions for multiple users.They don't even understand the concept . I think less than 5% of users actually need that at home .
6)Again , nobody actually uses the command line interface . I installed cygwin bash shell on my machine , but normal people dont need that .
7) When was the last time you've met a home user that tried creating 10 accounts ?
8) No secure automation of common tasks . Not secure automation of anything .

I think Vista is a useless upgrade , and a total waste of money . But that's because I am perfectly happy with the way XP behaves at this point .

Bash is a shell. However, having it installed helps immensely with compiling Free Software, because the majority of it is distributed with a GNU Autotools ( ./configure && make ) build system. That's why Cygwin (or, in a pinch, Msys) is such a must-have for building Free Software on win32.

Personally, I'm a linux guy. But when I've got to image windows, I use their sysprep tools from the resource kit cd's, and then use ntfsclone from the ntfsprogs package to do the actual backup and restore.

Conceptually, the whole thing is easy. Sysprep removes the windows registry identification, device map, and just redetects them upon first boot. However, theres a few steps you'll need to do after restoring from sysprep, but you can automate them. Things like having a random hostname generated for you. OK, not the best - so I make cygwin part of the image, and hack up some bash script to do a reverse DNS lookup on the localhost IP (from static MAC based DHCP lease), and have it rename itself using the netdom tools. Agh... oh yeah, so you pretty much need cygwin to automate your imaging process if you're going to use sysprep. Given enough time you can make it smo~oth, but you gotta sit down and hack it.

And if this was linux, I'd say use SIS.

--
RTFM, cause bitches love dat shit.

If you're coming from a windows-heavy background then I recommend Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). It will give you a chance to gain comfort and experience in a *nix like environment without leaving your windows safety-zone. And like most other things in life, the best way to learn *nix is to use it as much as possible (Something that may not be possible with pure *nix due to the relatively steep learning curve and overwhelming amounts of material you will need to learn to become truly competent).

IE: if your still not comfortable with Vi or Emacs, you can fall back on your favorite windows Text editor as needed, instead of spending more time reading man pages and memorizing shortcuts.

Plus Cygwin can compile and run a significant portion of *nix programs from source. The ability to configure, compile, and install from source is a very important part of learning *nix (IMHO).

Of course you will still need a real *nix system to learn the actual details, such as the config files in /etc on various systems, but coming home to a Cygwin system that you can actually use (with the occasional windows crutch) might speed you along in your *nix education.

Just to say, Cygwin and PuTTY are both open source programs. Cygwin implements a Unix environment for Windows (including the ability to compile and run POSIX-only programs), and PuTTY is typically used for SSH, SFTP, and SCP.

You could install it from Cygwin: http://www.cygwin.com/

When I first heard about Ruby, I just popped open a bash shell and typed "ruby". There it was! Cygwin has tons of utilities that you'll find when you really need them.

Unfortunately, your instructions don't help with Win2k Pro and Cisco CallManager installations.

They would if you were running OpenSSH from Cygwin, wouldn't they?

Ha ha. That's funny... everyone knows the best of both worlds is here.