Ruby Development in Windows
I’ve done the unthinkable and I have a confession to make.
I’ve switched my development machines to Windows.
Here’s the story of my heresy … and my possible salvation.
A History Lesson
A couple of years ago my bosses realized that me and my colleague had been using an underpowered machine (mine was my personal Macbook Air mid 2010 and my colleague was a Dell XPS 13) and had offered to get me a new development machine.
I would have wanted the latest and greatest, fully upgraded Macbook Pro but we had a budget. Actually we didn’t – we were told that as one of the top value producers in the team, we can have (and should have) any machine that we wanted – but I didn’t want to push my luck. Besides, the servers I administer and target my development for are running Linux; I believe my development environment should closely match that of production to minimize bugs due to architectural mistmatches.
So I got quite a nice beastly desktop with a nice graphics card (an i7 Sandy Bridge and 16GB of ram, SSD and a terabyte 7200rpm disk drive). Since most of my colleagues used Macs, I hackintoshed.
It was smooth sailing but a bit inconvenient. I was stuck using 10.7 when everyone had upgraded to Mountain Lion. I had to decline all system updates and point patches. Then disaster struck, a driver was causing a kernel panic.
I switched fully to Ubuntu 12.04 for about half a year. It was an okay experience.
Then my colleague resigned. I cannibalized his desktop and found he ahd a really good graphics card (I couldn’t get that graphics card because it wasn’t hackintosh friendly). I installed it but my Ubuntu machine is having problems with my multi monitor setup with that card.
Trying Out Windows
So I decided to try out Windows. I thought I could still use cygwin, but it wasn’t an easy ride. After a full day of non-productivity just trying to get things running, I thought maybe I can try Virtualization.
Here’s what I had:
VirtualBox - Ubuntu 14.04 Shared folders extension pack guest additions https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads inconsolata
In order to make sure I’m able to access the network share, I had to add myself to the vboxsf group:
sudo adduser xxx vboxsf