I wrote earlier of my experiences using Windows XP, a move I've considered somewhat unfortunate but necessary. I've added a couple more tools to my toolbox since that have made the environment even better.

A co-worker told me about coLinux, a port of the linux kernel that allows it to run side-by-side with Windows on the same machine. It's kind of like vmware, only more optimized, and free. I'd looked at it, but was a bit daunted as I wanted to try and use my existing Ubuntu install with it, and was worried about messing up the machine.

I finally came to the realization, however, that I simply won't be using linux as my day-to-day OS until some of my tools are ported. So, I blew away my ubuntu install and made room for coLinux.

I'd heard that it was difficult to setup, but I found it fairly easy — download the coLinux tools, get a filesystem image, add the service, fire it up. You then need to do a few other things — bridge your network interface with the coLinux network interface, set your network IP for the coLinux install, setup your root password and any new users you want — but then it's running. You can then use Cygwin to SSH into the install.

The basic coLinux filesystem is Debian, and based on an old Sid version. It is very stripped down, and has no developer tools. I had to apt-get a ton of stuff — gcc, cpp, cvs, subversion, darcs, libtool, some development libraries, etc — so I could start compiling things. I compiled Vim by hand, because if you want Vim with perl support in Debian, it insists on installing a ton of X related stuff. I then compiled Apache2, PHP4, and PHP5 by hand (and needed to get additional development libraries for some features I wanted). But the compiles worked flawlessly, and I now have coLinux running on the machine with a flexible development environment that I control.

(I've also figured out a way to run PHP4 and PHP5 seemingly on the same Apache install, side-by-side, but that's a topic for another day.)

While you can access the system via SSH, I find that's not terribly convenient for doing simple things like editing files. So I installed Samba in my coLinux install, and set it up with a few shares. With that in place, I can now access files directly from Windows — editing them in gVim, etc.

I setup Exim via cygwin. However, I noticed when I'd try and send emails from my coLinux install via the cygwin exim, exim typically errored — usually an inability to fork a process. So I installed it via coLinux instead, and all is hunky dory — my PHP scripts can now send mail, and I have a local SMTP server for queuing and sending mail instead of having to rely on the company or personal mail server.

In reading on the coLinux site, I discovered that you can setup programs that utilize esd, and run esd off of cygwin. This has allowed me to once again use mpd as my preferred music player.

Since I'm constantly going into my coLinux install, I created a copy of the cygwin.bat script that adds a -c "ssh myname@myCoLinuxInstall" to the bash command; this allows me to click on a single icon in order to SSH into coLinux — very handy.

All-in-all, I now have what I consider to be the best of both worlds — access to the work programs I need, ease of configuration for a variety of tools (wireless, bluetooth, USB devices), and a robust server/development environment — all on the same box.