Best setup for Linux development from Windows? [closed]

Answer 1

Either a Virtual Machine with a Linux-based dev environment, or a local copy of some toolchain-agnostic IDE (e.g. Notepad++, with testing done via MinGW or CygWin as far as you can), or just write in Notepad++ and keep uploading to your dev machine and testing there, which is what I do.

Answer 2

Use Linux! I usually have the other problem: developing win under linux. There is no reason for not doing so: I have win running on a virtual box now almost all the time. Linux comes with a lot of development tools.

The problem is:

is it a graphical interface? - If no you will have no problems as soon as your code STD/portable. (X allows you simple stuff too but for an nice application today you need a bit more.) - If Yes then you will have a lot of problems when you actually port the code on the running platform.

Is it supposed to be portable/exchangeable between linux and windows? - if not, just develop on the native OS. Way less pain. You have Eclipse for both platforms. Even if you think to port the code on a later stage, just do the work for one first.

I developed a couple of graphical application under linux which are actually right now used only under windows. My recipe is: GTK/GNOME. I made it running with cygwin and mingw. But I guess that Qt has the same usable environment too. My code went on win with no changes! [ok.. a couple of touching on file paths... but was a bug..]

There is no way to develop under win and hope to be running on linux unless you are sure not to use any win libs. That is: in a graphical application almost no chance. Or a lot of checking... Or you will not be using any win facility. Forget Visual Studio.

Check indeed wine and the winehq pages.

Unless the problem is another, like: using team sharing facilities, or svn or whatever. Which is not a code development problem but a bit more on the organizational side.

Bottom line: It is way easier to port a free code on win then a proprietary code on the free market.

bis F

Answer 3

I don't know if there's a more modern route, but the standard way in my time was to run X Windows in Microsoft Windows, that way you can run any number of applications on your Ubuntu machine and control them and display them in Microsoft Windows

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Answer 4

The best approach that I've found is to:

1. keep your code portable
2. develop natively on your desktop
3. verify any OS dependencies (minimize these as much as possible)
4. deploy to your target regularly, test & debug there

I know that this isn't a direct answer, but using an IDE for development through X is painful with most of the free tools. The only way that I've been productive doing work this way was when I was running a UNIX-like on my desktop so X was native. If you are going to use this approach, try a commercial X solution on the desktop.

Other than that, consider ditching the IDE and doing your development and debugging via SSH, a terminal editor (e.g., vi, pico, ee, emacs), make/ant, and gdb.

The best approach for you is going to be driven by your programming language and the type of application you're developing. If you are doing GUI applications, then using X might be the only approach that is acceptable. If you are doing back-office/daemon development, then the SSH and terminal approach will probably work though you probably want to get really comfortable with either vi or emacs.

EDIT: just noticed that you are doing C/C++ development. Consider using a cross platform framework if you aren't already. Using something like Qt, APR, ACE, or Poco should make it possible to natively develop under Windows with a deploy/debug step to your Linux environment.

Answer 5

I'm using xming as well and suffer from the same problems with Eclipse. Apparently, neither switching to cygwin makes it fast enough. Eventually I switched to developing in vim via xming. It doesn't take as much time as I feared to get used to all the key combinations, and the performance is absolutely smooth. Actually, now sometimes I use vim even when working natively.

Answer 6

There are multiple solutions, I'd recommend No. 1

1. A VM (Virtual Machine) running a flavor of linux as a guest operating system inside Windows. Start with VirtualBox which is free.

   To make managing it easier you can use a tool like Vagrant. Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity. So you code in your Windows PC and compile/run the application on a Linux system using Vagrant. Vagrant is free! Similar tool: Docker can be used too. For this setup you can use any IDE, I'd recommend VSCode its quite handy for C/C++ with intellisense but Eclipse should work too.

2. Web based tool like Nitrous.io which is discontinued, but you can host your own open-source version of the Nitrous IDE called Nitrous Solo which lets you host your own instance of the Nitrous IDE on your preferred cloud provider.

3. Windows 10 provides provides Windows Subsystem for Linux, try using that to compile and run your project. This requires a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Anniversary Update or later (build 1607+).

4. Cygwin / MinGW are popular bash tools for Windows, they might be able to compile and/or run your application.