Since I’m lugging around a dual-core Vista laptop, I thought I’d try to make it more useful for hacking.

I’ve tried using the win32 version of xemacs, Eclipse (crashed due to some lock violation), other editors like TotalEdit, et al, but it all feels very clunky compared to a unix environment. Cygwin is ok, but has its issues as well. For one thing, running erlang from within a cygwin shell messes up command-line editing.

Enter Cooperative Linux, or coLinux – a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run natively alongside another OS. I played around a bit with various pre-built distributions, and finally settled for the bare-bones Debian Etch root file system that comes as an option with the basic coLinux install. I use my existing Cygwin X server, and resized the root partition up to 16 8 GB.

So far, so good. I’ve used apt-get to install the necessary utilities, and was able to build Erlang/OTP R12B-4 without problems. The system feels pretty much like a native linux installation.

coLinux on Vista

The thing I have yet to figure out is how to share a file system between coLinux and Vista. I thought of using a Cygwin NFS daemon, but I don’t seem to have enough access privileges on my work laptop to pull that off. But overall, it feels extremely promising.