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Re: cygwin or linux conundrum
by ybiC (Prior) on Jul 29, 2002 at 00:05 UTC
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First off, welcome to The Monastery. 8^)
If you already have *nix experience, or are interested in gaining some, then I'd encourage you to give Cygwin a try. It's really quite slick - I've had good luck with it for cross-platform perling from a win32 box, although ymmv. Since it's a layer on top of win32, I wouldn't expect you to have problems with the winmodem or pppoe dsl.
If nothing else, you gain *nix commandline tools like less and grep from your win32 cmd.exe shell.
cheers,
Don
striving toward Perl Adept
(it's pronounced "why-bick")
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Well it seems that cygwin is the way to go so i believe i'm going to head in that direction and install linux on a desktop once i procure one. Also, thanks ybiC for the welcome.
@t=(201,205);print v99.111.109.109.111.110.32,chr(@t)
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Re: cygwin or linux conundrum
by tstock (Curate) on Jul 28, 2002 at 23:51 UTC
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I've been told I'm biased on this subject but:
Learning how to write portable code is learning better perl, so this is an opportunity, not problem, if you decide to stick with Win2k. If you want to have a easier time at "using" perl, I'll venture that most target systems are Unix based so it'll be easier to use a unix based computer.
It is my experience that dual boot only works if you have a strong need for both OS'es, otherwise it's a waste of space. You're probably better of with linux and wine/crossover or MS windows 2k and cygwin.
extra: my ADSL connection works on PPPoE and I had very little trouble making it work on my linux machines.
Tiago
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Re: cygwin or linux conundrum
by ajt (Prior) on Jul 29, 2002 at 08:48 UTC
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You should find that nearly all Perl modules will build and install okay with ActiveState Perl. You will probably need to get hold of Microsoft's nmake.exe to do this, but it's free and easy to get hold off.
For the modules that have a c component, you can find the more common ones in one of the many PPM repositories. You should be able to find most modules compiled for you somewhere - though sometimes not the most recent version.
If you buy Microsoft Visual c/c++ you can compile your own modules from scratch and you should find that most of CPAN is then at your disposal.
With Cygwin you get Unix emulation layer for Windows, with a suite of very useful Unix tools that all work great from the bash or even cmd.exe prompt. I would say that if you have the space on a NT/2K box install Cygwin whatever you do....
Cygwin Perl is great, and allows you to run Perl almost as if it were on a real Unix system. It's is not perfect, but it is pretty good. It is a tad bit slower because of the emulation layer, but overall it's a very good alternative.
I too have the problem of a Winmodem on one my main system, but found a re-built scrap system more than adequate as a Linux environment. When I get my next system, it will be a Linux only box.....
Some useful past nodes:
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Re: cygwin or linux conundrum
by peschkaj (Pilgrim) on Jul 28, 2002 at 23:56 UTC
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I would just throw cygwin on with win2k. I run this configuration on my work PC and home PC because I often have to write code and port it to our HP-UX, Sun, and Slackware machines. Admittedly, I have never gotten perl-5.8.0 to build properly on cygwin, but I don't think that too many people are overly concerned about that.
As far as I am aware, most modules should work fine on cygwin. | [reply] |
Re: cygwin or linux conundrum
by perrin (Chancellor) on Jul 29, 2002 at 16:35 UTC
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I have used both Linux and Cygwin and on Win2K for developing Perl, and I find Cygwin to be a compromise at best. The terminal app on Win2K sucks, the integration between Cygwin and ActiveState Perl doesn't work transparently (#! doesn't work for me), modules won't compile with Cygwin and are not all available for ActiveState, etc. Linux is a dream to work with by comparison, and much better if you just want to hack some headache-free perl, in my opinion.
Also, Roaring Penguin PPPoE works great on Linux and was easier to set up than the stuff Earthlink gives out for Windows. | [reply] |
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The terminal app on Win2K sucks
Not sure what you mean by this -- the Cygwin terminal apps are bash, tcsh, etc. same as Linux. Also, X is available under Cygwin (although not in rootless mode yet) so you can run your favorite xterm variant.
the integration between Cygwin and ActiveState Perl doesn't work transparently (#! doesn't work for me)
This is true out-of-the-box, although there is a workaround described here.
modules won't compile with Cygwin and are not all available for ActiveState, etc.
This has been my experience under W2K Pro as well :(
Josh
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The terminal app on Win2K sucks
Not sure what you mean by this -- the Cygwin terminal apps are bash, tcsh, etc. same as Linux. Also, X is available under Cygwin (although not in rootless mode yet) so you can run your favorite xterm variant. There is a port of rxvt that runs on Windows without an X server. I _think_ it is part of the default install of cygwin. If it isn't, it can easily be installed with cygwin's setup.exe.rxvt is a console app, so you will see a command window flash open and close when starting rxvt from a shortcut. If you don't like the black window flashing, use editbin (part of VC++) or look at Jenda's page here for a perl script (exetype.pl) that will change the subsystem of rxvt from console to gui. I use this for rxvt, it works well.
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Re: cygwin or linux conundrum
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jul 29, 2002 at 21:57 UTC
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