I started my career working in Linux and continue to do so. I recently bought a laptop with Windows 7. I like windows 7 for bringing back the performance which was lost in Vista.

I am so much used to writing code in vim and using shell for doing all development that I felt I need to look around for making windows 7 my development box.

You might argue I should use cygwin, I wanted to use native applications.

Search is ON

Command Shell:

I looked around for possible shell for windows. Windows comes packaged with cmd.exe and powershell. Powershell seemed like it will fit the bill for my requirement. My major requirement is to run python, vim, mercurial and any other software needed for development.

Editor:

I have been using vim for past 7 years and could not think of using any other editor for development. I searched whether I can get vim for windows. There are multiple versions available for Windows and found vim for win32 console, just what I wanted (http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc).

Add the editor to the PATH.

If you use some other editor, I am sure it would have been ported.

Other utilities:

Other unix utilities like grep, awk, sed, less, tee, tar and more are used in day to day work. I thought basic development environment will be complete only after I have those in my laptop. Fortunately, most everything is ported to windows and is available @ gnuwin32.sourceforge.net. If you are lazy to download packages one by one, there is another project in sourceforge which takes care of automating the download process (http://getgnuwin32.sourceforge.net/). All you need to do is download one package, extract it and run download.bat and install.bat found. Voila, all command line utilities are in your system. Check readme file for further information.

Thanks to everyone who worked on porting these software to windows, I have a workable environment in windows!

I am not claiming that this setup can replace a development environment setup on linux. This setup helps me do what i wanted to do. I feel at home if i use shell thats all .

Fedora 12 is out in few mirrors.

one of the mirror

http://fedora.c3sl.ufpr.br/linux/releases/12/

Full mirror list

Few new features of fedora 12 are

• Dracut is a replacement for nash/mkinitrd
• Set Empathy as the default IM client
• Re-base to GNOME 2.28
• Rebase to KDE 4.3 and offer new features such as DeviceKit support
• Lots of new virtualization features
• Add support to Fedora for the Moblin Core NetBook/NetTop/MID desktop environment
• Rakudo is an implementation of the Perl 6 specification for the Parrot virtual machine
• Update libtheora to the 1.1 release
• Changing the base architecture to i686 and optimizing for current 32-bit processors

Complete feature list here

Linus torvalds in an interview has told that Linux is increasingly becoming bloated.

“We’re getting bloated, yes it’s a problem,” Torvalds said. “I’d love to say we have a plan. I mean, sometimes it’s a bit sad and we’re definitely not the streamlined hyper-efficient kernel that I had envisioned 15 years ago. The kernel is huge and bloated.”

more here

Windows only: Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive.

Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn’t bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.

The coolest parts about Portable Ubuntu are:

• It actually works (in most cases, on most systems).
• It fits on a (larger) thumb drive and can run entirely from it.
• It can work on, and save to, your Windows folders and files.
• It’s persistent, so changes you make and apps you install are carried around with you.
• It’s easily manageable from Windows, and works great on dual monitors.

[Read More]

In Fedora 11 Alpha, when I try to install any package I get cpio md5 mismatch. To solve the issue we need to update the rpm package

as root, run

# yum update rpm

After this step, Installing anything continued without issue.

Linpus Lite Instant-on OS is a linux distribution built for fast bootup (see the video to believe it). It is Linpus Lite OS in action. It is 700 MB  linux distribution. get your copy from link below the video.

more here