Making The Leap

I’‘ve got a problem. I work in an all windows shop, but I develop in rails. Normally, that’s not such a big deal, but every once in a while, you find a plugin or gem that only works in linux. Usually, I’d through together a virtual machine loaded with linux and develop that way. It’s kinda a pain though, having to set up samba shares and editing your code “remotely”.

Recently, I found a project called andLinux (andLinux.org). This is a modified linux kernel that runs inside of Windows. It ships with a basic set of tools, Konquerer, Kate, Konsole, .etc….oh, I did I mention it’s KDE based :) All of these programs can interact directly with the windows desktop. As a matter of fact, now I have a right-click option to edit xml files in Kate.

The really cool part though is how I can develop rails apps. After I installed andLinux, I compiled ruby. I installed Apache2, Mysql, Passenger Phusion (mod_rails) and Rails and a host of other gems. The andLinux distro is able to see your windows hard drives by default, so in my Apache config, I pointed directly to the mounted windows directory where my source files exist. In the linux terminal I can script/server and go back to Netbeans on windows and edit to my hearts content.

I used these two links to configure the server.

Compiling Ruby, Rubygems and Rails on Ubuntu

Setting up Ubuntu and Passenger