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*nix-like environments for Windows

| cygwin | linux | MinGW |

*nix like environment is good for developer and sysadmins, and really useful for end-user. That’s why we’ve got KDE, Gnome and similar. But, I like it a lot even if I’m Windows user ;-). There are several cases to set up *nix environment on Windows:

  • setup Virtual Machine with some Linux distributive and you’ve got fully functional Linux. You can use VMware or VirtualBox.
  • or you can setup Linux-like environment in Windows (i.e. bash, gcc,make, grep, find, sed, etc.).

Here is “my” list of choice for such environments:

  1. MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows. My top choice if you need GNU development programming tool set. Additional, if you need bash and similar tools install MSYS - general purpose command line environment.
  2. Cygwin - is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It’s very powerful if you need to develop OS-portable application on windows (it’s provide substantial Linux API functionality).
  3. GnuWin32 - provides ports of tools with a GNU or similar open source licenses. Check package list on their home page.
  4. UWIN - it’s the similar to MinGW and GnuWin32, but less popular.

I prefer to use MinGW/MSYS and Cygwin because they have great community support.