Sep 06
It drives me crazy to watch an admin figure out how to login to a box with putty. I believe that you can’t manage Unix systems without Unix tools. I switched to Cygwin years ago, except for /dev/random it’s indistingusiable from a workstation. I can do anything I’d do on a Unix box, including installing perl Expect which requires compiling and a tty. It’ll even compile MySQL from source and run it 100% Unix style. It’s seems to have some preformance issues, but you can develop and test with it.
I love having all my tools on a single box. On the Windows side I use True X-Mouse. It has real sloppy focus and seamless highlight/middle-mouse button for cut-and-paste.
Under Cygwin I run the light and fast ‘fvwm.’ Here are the instructions and a tar file for doing a Cygwin X11 install from scratch.