For quick testing, portable Linux or portable programming language?

Question

Hi all:

My current role requires me to setup environment which mimics the customer's and perform various checks to replicate and then analyze the problem.

Chances are, I often find working with Windows environments such like XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 is a bit painful without having the handly linux-based shell and some command-line progamming languages such as Perl.

Of course I can just install everything onto the new system and then start working, but it is a bit time-consuming and boring.

So I am wondering which is a better way of working around this?

I can for sure use Qemu to create a portable linux image which doesn't require any host system interference, even without the need of rebooting so to use it. The weakness of this is I have to figure out a way to transfer the files between hosting Windows and embedded Linux. The good part is that I can use all the weapons in Linux's arsenal.

Or I can start looking for a proper portable progamming language such like Movable Python, some variant of Perl or even Lua as a embedded language. Pros: familiar with the language; Cons: have to use scripts to do everything.

My day-to-day activities envolves but not limit to :

Checking the text logs and/or xml.

Grepping important sections from logs for further analysis.

some automate process like application server configuration etc...

automated functional testing - and result comparison

some system admin's job, networking diagnostics, checking process and services, etc...

Any good ideas? Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

While I am a die-hard Linux fan I would recommend in your case to look at Cygwin, preferably on a USB drive or similar. It can live in a single directory, be started with a simple script and end up with (almost) all the Unix goodness, but still being able to access all of the host platform resources.

There are the usual warts related to / vs \ and even worse the case insensitive but case preserving filenames with lot's of spaces in them, but that's equally obnoxious on any other command line.

There is also Mingw but it's scope is more limited I found. It works exceedingly well in a couple of selected target areas, but less so for a GP wide unix-like environment.

I have had a cygwin folder on all my windows machines (and the ones I had to use/repair/maintain) for a very long time now.