Options for Linux on Windows:
Tools Only
Given you're using Eclipse I'm going to assume you want a full IDE, but if you can get by with just the GNU/Linux tools, there are a few choices.
- cygwin gives you a bash shell with lots of tools, including an X11 server. This has been around awhile and is mature.
- msys is a smaller, lightweight alternative to cygwin.
- GNU utilities for Win32 is another lightweight alternative. These are native versions of the tools, as opposed to cygwin which requires a cygwin DLL to fake out its tools into thinking they are running on Linux.
Linux in a Windows Process
There are several packages that will run Linux as a Windows process, without simulating an entire PC as virtualization does. They use Cooperative Linux, a.k.a. coLinux, which is limited to 32-bit systems. These don't have the overhead of virtualizing, and they start up faster since you're not booting a virtual PC. This is a little more on the experimental side and may not be as stable as some of the virtualization options.
Virtualization
Virtualization software lets you boot up another OS in a virtual PC, one that shares hardware with the host OS. This is pretty tried-and-true. There are nice options here for taking snapshots of your Virtual PC in a particular state, suspend/resume a virtual PC, etc. It's nice to be able to experiment with a virtual PC, add a few packages, then revert to a previous snapshot and "start clean".
- VMWare
- VirtualBox
- VirtualPC
In my case...
Sounds like your environment has different performance characteristics, but here's my situation: I started out with Eclipse on my Windows laptop (doing Rails development), found this sluggish, and switched to using putty to ssh into a fast Linux box. I do my editing via an emacs running on the Linux server, displayed on Windows using Xming. Or I use native emacs on Windows, editing the files shared via NFS. The latter is slower in my environment due to sluggish saves.
When working from home, I ditch X because it is too slow with remote clients, and just run emacs -nw within a putty window. I then use GNU screen so that I have multiple "windows", and so that I can easily resume where I left off if my network connection flakes out.
