Windows: A Survival Guide

*ponderous sigh*

After several months of enduring painful multi-monitor support (like cursor rendering problems and the inability to have monitors at different resolutions) and even more painful support for LEAP (for wifi access at work) ... I've finally given up on Linux on the Laptop and gone back to Windows XP.

This comes at a time when I no longer have my own cube at the Lab, because as Wassim puts it, I'm now "working from exile." Ed and I have elected to go mobile to save Big Blue some real estate costs (and to *cough* help the environment by staying home more).

Along with our switch to mobile status, Marcelo and Dave have moved too. They were made to give up their windows in D3 and now sit in Upper Middle Cube-land over in B3. So, to preserve the balance in the universe, Marcelo and I have gone back to Windows. (For those keeping score, that's 2 down, 2 up.)

Today was my first day at IBM without my own cube, sweet cube. Because of the aforementioned LEAP problems and because I no longer have a second monitor keeping my desk from blowing away in the breeze, it was time to revisit my Windows partition. I spent a portion of the afternoon setting up cygwin for the first time, including apt-cyg (a commandline way to update cygwin a la apt-get from the Debian/Ubuntu world). Then, in order to faciliate migrating my desktop settings from my linux partition into cygwin, I discovered Ext2 Installable File System For Windows.

This kicks ass and almost makes life in Windows bearable. It supports both ext2 and ext3 (if properly unmounted), and allows me to read & write into my linux partition via a mounted drive letter (though I haven't dared to try writing to it yet!). With this I can browse naturally w/ Windows Explorer or even with cygwin.

Next up to install was Pidgin, aka Gaim 2.0, which now supports Sametime natively, and imported my old Gaim 1.5 settings & buddy lists automatically... except where it lost my IRC buddies/chats and forgot which plugins I had enabled. Meh, close enough. Interface is a bit cleaner than the old Gaim 1.5, but I don't like the new icons.

Anyway, all the apps I use daily are back, bar one:

• Mail/IM: Gaim + Meanwhile -> Pidgin; Notes 7; GMail; Thunderbird
• Web: Firefox 1.5 or 2
• Development: Eclipse 3.3 w/ phpeclipse, shelled, eclipsecolorer, mylyn; Cirrus or Beyond Compare w/ WINE -> Beyond Compare 2; (g)vim/Kate -> EditPlus
• Console: Konsole --> cygwin console
• Filesystem: Konqueror --> ???

Does anyone know of a filesystem browser that works for Windows that allows pane splitting and supports tabs & ssh? Anything's better than Windows Explorer, but I really miss Konqueror!

Maybe I'll have to play with Cygwin/X to see if I can get Konq back that way...