Which Distro for a Windows Developer
 

Thinking about taking the dive and getting linux on my computer.

Not sure which distro I should use, downloaded Knoppix live and it was well... just ok.

I am a windows developer mainly use C# - so any OS I use will have to have the ability to run Visual Studio 2005 as this is my only source of income at the moment.

Has anyone out there run VS2006 using (o whats it called) wine or some other program that runs windows or windows programs inside of linux?

Also ...

What programming language should I get into for linux - Java, Delphi, C, other ?

Downloading Ubuntu live CD now just to check it out.

Not if MS can help it......;) (Look at the Codeweavers (commercial version of wine) site to see what they say about Visual Studio)

Seriously, my hunch is that developing Windows apps on Linux is not going to be particulary rewarding.

i have a seperate machine running windows just for VS2005. i doubt youll have luck getting it to work on linux. mono is a C# clone that you can use on linux, you may want to look into that.

I think Windows XP Professional would be a good distrobution for you. Why move to linux if you want to do Windows programming? Just sounds incredibly stupid to me.

Dual-booting, I could understand that... maybe something to look at.

:tisk:
I never said that I wanted to do windows programming - I said that I have to because of job requirments.

Now if that means I dual boot or run two seperate boxes (linux for personal and xp for work) that is fine with me.

Anyways - which is a good distro for a linux newb like myself and which programing language for linux should I learn.

C# and VS2006 are probably no going to leave my life unless Microsoft bursts into flames or I get a different job. I will check out wine as the previous poster mentioned but not keeping my hopes up ;)

Hmm... cs-cam lived up to his signature there, didn't he? ;) hehehe

My choice of distro for you would be Suse, because it's probably going to be the most comfortable for you to get started with. My guess is that as a reasonably sophisticated Windows user, you'll probably find KDE much easier to use than Gnome, and Suse is by far the most comprehensive KDE-based distro out there. Failing that, you could try Kubuntu (rather than Ubuntu), for similar reasons.



As for Wine, it can run a good number of Windows apps, but there are some programs that will never be likely to run under Wine, and Visual Studio is definitely in that category. You do have a good chance of being able to get your finished programs running under Wine, though.


Hope that helps :)

The most important thing you'll have to do is unlearn windows to work in linux. Things are just fundamentally different. One of the other is not necessarily bad, but different.

If you're looking for a distro, take the quizes in my signature...

That would be the only sensible idea. Whether you want to do Windows programming or not is irrelevant is it not? You have to for you job and that's the end of the story. Running VS2005 in linux isn't a bright idea, dual-booting is a bright idea if you want to try linux but need to continue to use Windows which you do.

It's not like you're only getting half the experience or anything, there are a crap load of people here who do it...

Thanks for the responses.
Will give them a try this weekend.

why not dual boot?
keep M$ for programming and you can get use to linux.

Any Linux distribution will work. I suggest Gentoo because the compiler is already installed.

Dual booting can be a pain at times because you have to stop what you are doing and reboot. VMware gives you the possibility of running two or more 80x86 operating systems at the same time.

I do not recommend using WINE to run Windows programs that are going to make programs for production systems. Who ever thinks that WINE can be reliable and stable enough to be used for production systems are idiots.

Java, C, C++, assembler.

Which Distro for a Windows Developer
 

Another Viable option would be VMware Server (which is free) and install Win XP Pro on top of it. There is a project that runs on Linux that allows for C# programming as well which I note was not mentioned - the projects name is MONO and is cross platform. I realize that it wont be possible to run VS2006 on a Linux platform but you can put in a VMware or you can try Mono.

As for distros I personally like my Slackware distro - it offers a lot of freedom in how you develop and play with it - and I do a lot of programming in PERL as my language.

Happy Developing and Linuxing and welcome to the fold.

(sh) Sneaky Mogs (sh)

The best distro for Windows development is Windows itself, unfortunately. I do know folks who write their code on Linux (using Emacs. Ugh!) and compile/debug on Windows, but that's akin to folks who like to use the BFH for everything, even when a screwdriver is more appropriate for the job.

If you must run Linux for Windows development, You might find Win2K or WinXP running in a qemu/kqemu instance to be an acceptable solution, and if you have an MSDN license you will even be 100% legal (even including Microsoft's skewed perception of legality which ignores your first sale and fair use rights) because they "allow" ten concurrent installations per subscription, per engineer, and make no distinction between a physical PC and virtualized environments.

If your desire is for Unix shells and tools, check out cygwin.

I recommend mandriva 2007. It is easy to install and has a control center.

Eclipse, KDevelop, and MonoDevelop are IDEs for Linux.

There was an IDE for Delphi - Kylix but it was abandoned by Borland.

In my opinion, the first language that you should learn is the command language of BASH. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash

One more option is to use remote desktop. I have a Windows box just for my team's website, it uses ASP. So, I do all of my editing of the files on my linux box, transfer them over to the Windows box and remote desktop into it to test them. I also sometimes edit them this way, since I can't get EditPad Pro running well in Linux and the syntax highlighting for ASP is not good in any Linux editor I have tried.

Kubuntu
http://www.kubuntu.org/

Uses KDE desktop, one CD install works both as a live and Install CD. Be wary it is a bit bloated.

Mandriva
http://frontal2.mandriva.com/en/downloads/mirrors

This is what PCLinuxOS is based on it is a BIG distrobution with all you will ever need


PCLinuxOS .92
http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/dist...glish/preview/
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distr...glish/preview/

This is the distro I use and recommend, Why because it works right out of the box. No need to configure Everything, everything just works. It also comes as a 1 CD install that is a live CD that you can install later if you wish.

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/download.html

This Distro is small fast and effective, the ultimite Workers CD

Blag
http://www.blagblagblag.org/download/

is A one CD install of Fedora Core

OPENSUSE
http://www.opensuse.org/Download


Mephis
http://www.mepis.org/

Everything you will ever need on 1 CD. Hardware detection is exelent, as is the feel and look of the distro

you might also want to try out Fedora Core, loads of programming tools:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mirrors

oh also before I forget I have recently accuired a KVM switch that allows you to run two machines with one Monotor and keyboard, if you don't want to dual boot that would be the way to go

Hope this Helps,

Jake

I too do Windows development work with Visual Studio and lots of web work using JAVA.

Less than a year ago I swapped over to Linux for my personal machine, the command line is back ! it will take you back to your old DOS days !

Linux is great for programmers and engineers you'll be up and running in no time and the choices are unlimited !
I'm presently running Mandriva 2006 with a KDE desktop, I love it !

My Linux box is stacked on top of my identical Windows XP Professional machine for the development work. Both boxes are identical Compaq Evo 1.8 Ghz machines, no fancy video or sound cards. No hardware problems and very little tweaking required for Linux.

I personally recommend Mandriva 2007 with KDE, it appears lots of Linux pros use Slackware, going to give it a try someday.

For me it would be Debian but any distro will work. And like many before me, I recommend a dual boot setup in your case. Also, since you are a programmer, why not look up wxWidgets (and MinGW as the compiler). It's a cross platform GUI toolkit so when you are ready to program some Linux app, give this some thought. I too suffer from split personalties (of the Windows and Linux kind). Windows at work and Linux at home (although I am starting to convert many co-workers :) ). I do develop some C++ apps in Windows for my job but at least I can control what I can use (which is wxWidgets).