I had the entertaining pleasure of my laptop becoming worthless this week and was stuck with a company loner while mine is in the shop. What to do, what to do? Luckily, I was able to get everything I needed off my hd before dropping it off for service. Still, even with my data, I was sure I was gonna be worthless with the temp laptop. BECAUSE… The temp is a Win XP machine and I was running Ubuntu on my laptop.
The cool thing is that after installing Cygwin and the Window’s version of Eclipse I was back in business. And the best part was that for the most part all my env vars I had setup in my .bashrc on my Ubuntu box worked on my Win XP box under Cygwin.
The key was that I install the vast majority of my stuff in $HOME/de. On the WinXP box I installed everything in c:\dev. The only thing I had to do to get all my env vars working I had setup in my .bashrc was create a dev symbolic link in $HOME that pointed to c:\dev. BAM! That was it. I didn’t have to add any Window’s Environment variables. None! I was sure there would be some hacking needed there.
Obviously, the key to the hack was installing everything in the same dev dir on both machines.