Can one develop on a Windows box with Cygwin?

[russ]

I\'m a new Zaurus owner and am having a tough time getting up to speed on how best to do app development.  I\'m comfy with C++ but have never done development with cross compilers for embedded systems before, and my home box is Windows...  After a lot of downloading, reading, and futzing around, I\'m feeling stumped.  Does anyone know if it is even possible to get the trolltech sdk working with Cygwin on Win2k, or do I really need a true linux box?

[clivel]

I don\'t know if you can use cygwin, but do yourself a favour, set up your PC
to dual boot Linux & Windows.
That\'s what I did initially when I got into Zaurus development. I first allocated 1Gig of my hard drive too Linux, as time went on I found myself using Linux more and more. Now I have the 1 Gig devoted to Windows, and the other 5 Gig are Linux. I only use Windows for Pocket PC development and for my email with Eudora. Not that there are not a lot of good Linux email programs, I have just simply been to lazy to experiment with one that will handle importing my years worth of email archives.
I recommend that you give Mandrake or Suse a try, I tried both, I prefer Suse. Both installed flawlessly on my IBM A31 Thinkpad.  My only complaint with Linux, is that I haven\'t found a text editor that I really like. Many people swear by Vim or Emacs, and they are pretty adamant about their choices, but I find them both pretty clumsy to use.
I know that I didn\'t really answer your question, but give Linux a try, it will solve your development box problem.
Clive

[lardman]

I\'ve seen a posting giving instructions on how to do this.

http://www.zaurus.com/dev/board/index.php?...=6665&hl=cygwin

That said, I think dual booting will be easier in the end.


Simon

[lpotter]

CodeWarrior for Zaurus uses cygwin. If you have the money to spend on it, and only use windows, thats the way to go. CodeWarrior rocks. You debug your app while it is running on the device (through USB), and can step through the code.

[russ]

Thanks for the various suggestions!  Alas, I was unable to get the cygwin approach working.  (Got as far as an X window appearing, and then couldn\'t get past wacky shared memory crashes.)  After a fair bit of time and pain, I finally decided that stuff I want to program is sufficiently simple that I should just sidestep this whole issue crosscompiling C++ for zaurus/qt with win/cygwin business, and try Java instead, which seems to be working out so far, yay.

[2devnull]

that\'s why Java is so great despite the \"few\" side effects