We recently got an Averatec 2200 laptop, which is a pretty sweet device. It’s small, fast, and moreover, has a great feel to the keyboard. Unfortunately, it keeps locking up in Linux, and the wireless card doesn’t seem to get recognized when I installed Ubuntu 6.06.

Because I want to do a lot of unix-like development, I’ve been playing with how close I can get Windows to be like a Linux development environment. What I found was, quite a bit. I’m talking about both setting up compilers and shells, but also the graphical environment. Here is what I found:

  1. Cygwin / XWindows
    While you can get a free unix subsystem from Microsoft nowadays, the performance and compatibility has nothing on Cygwin.
    1. Go to the Cygwin site, and download and run the installer. The installer isn’t the most straightforward thing to use for the first time, but you get used to it quick. When you get to the package selection screen:
    2. Click on “View” once which will change it to “Full” view. This is easier to navigate.
    3. Add the following packages by clicking once where it says “skip” in front of them:
      • openssh
      • subversion
      • vim
      • X-startup-scripts
      • X-start-menu-icons
      • xwinwm
    4. Finish the install
    5. Go to My Computer->C:\->cygwin->usr->X11R6->bin
    6. Right-click on “startxwin.bat” and choose “edit.” Find the line that reads
      “%RUN% xterm -e /usr/bin/bash -l”, and put a “REM” in front of it. Save and close.
    7. Right-click drag the file called “startxwin.bat” onto start->All Programs->Startup, and choose “Create Shortcut Here”
    8. Edit c:\cygwin\etc\defaults\etc\ssh_config. Find the line that reads “# ForwardX11 no” and change it to “ForwardX11 yes“
  2. SSH
    While you now have command line access to ssh, there are a couple of useful ssh clients for Windows. You can install either or both Putty and Poderosa. Putty is lighter-weight, but Poderosa has a neat tabbed interface, and also lets you open a local cygwin shell as well. Unfortunately, Poderosa doesn’t natively support X11 port forwarding.
    1. Putty
      1. Download putty.exe from their web site
      2. Create a new directory c:\Program Files\Putty and copy putty.exe there
      3. Create a shortcut on the start menu to the c:\Program files\putty.
      4. Start putty
      5. Set Session->Protocol to “SSH”
      6. Set the Connection->SSH->X11->Enable X11 Forwarding to checked.
      7. Set Connection->SSH->Preferred SSH Protocol Version to “2 Only”
      8. under “Session,” save this as “Defaul Settings”
    2. Poderosa
      1. Download and install Poderosa from their web site
      2. To ssh to a remote host, use the “Cygwin session” and run ssh from it rather than doing an ssh from the menu (this way you can run remote X applications).
  3. Look and Feel
    I happen to like the Ubuntu “human” look-and-feel a lot. You ca set up Windows to act amazingly similar. First, you will need to patch Windows to allow you to use custom themes.
    1. Download and run UX Theme Patch from Softpedia
    2. Restart Windows
    3. Download the Human theme from DeviantArt
    4. extract the “human” directory from the theme file into c:\Windows\resources\themes\
    5. right-click on the desktop, and go to properties->appearance->Windows adn Buttons->Human
  4. Web Browsing
    Of course we are going to use Firefox to browse the web!
    1. Download and install it!
    2. Install the Human theme from Forever Now
    3. Activate the Human theme by going to tools->themes in Firefox
  5. Instant Messaging
    You can use Gaim for Instant Messaging. If you require MSN support, you’ll need to use the latest beta release:
    1. Download the gaim beta install exe from SourceForge
      Otherwise, you should download the latest stable release
    2. Download the gaim 1.5.0 release from Gaim
    3. Download some Windows plugins for Gaim (optional) for the Gaim Windows port
  6. Office
    We are going to use a version of OppenOffice for our office app. This one has some templates and clipart built into it, which makes it much more usable than the one from openoffice.org.
    1. You want to download OpenOffice Premium (OOo_2.0.3_060801_Win32Intel_install_wJRE.exe) from their SourceForge site.

Related posts