[thelist] Linux for development?

Burhan Khalid thelist at meidomus.com
Wed Oct 8 09:39:07 CDT 2003


Tim Burgan wrote:

> I'm wondering many web developers use RedHat or another Linux
> distribution as their 'main' OS for working over Windows or Mac. (I'm
> not talking about hosting, but what platform you use everyday).

I use Gentoo ( http://www.gentoo.org ) for development purposes.

> What software do you use in your development (html editor, graphics,
> etc)?

Editors I use, depending on the task include vim (command line short 
edits), nano (simpler than vim, no highlighting), SciTE (code 
highlighting, function folding "intellisense"-like function lookups, 
export to PDF, etc., etc.)

> What are the pros and cons of using Linux as my 'host' OS?

The immediate benefit is that your development and deployment platform 
at the same (in my case, I even configured the file system, php version, 
and apache so that it is exactly the same as my target platform). 
Another benefit I found is that some things (such as cvs, ftp, etc.) 
seem to work better on linux; and I don't even need to be on the 
physical box (ssh) to work on Linux.  Most of these are available on 
windows (some free, some not).

Granted for somethings I still use windows ... like the occasional game, 
outlook, etc. But for development I find that linux works best.

Just my $0.02


-- 
Burhan Khalid
thelist[at]meidomus[dot]com
http://www.meidomus.com



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