Dancing over the Windows, Day II

Installed XFire, and very interestingly only the administrator can change where it downloads files to, which should be in %AppData%\Xfire along with the users chat logs. I suspect the intention behind this "Odd" design choice was to force all downloads to occur in a shared folder, which can be automated for a routine virus scan - or because many games are so crapply made that they need to run under Administrators lol.


Xming, TeamSpeak2 were quickly smashed. The most important utilities to get installed were 7-Zip and InfoZip, for dealing with the archive files involved. After that I setup Python 2.6 and 3.1, Ruby, and Perl 5.10.0. The file associations can wait until later, but quite seriously I ain't going anywhere without Perl installed ;-).

Because I have both Python 2.6 and 3.1 installed, and the MSI installers override one anothers file associations, I had to manually setup the mappings that I want; which includes mapping .py2 and .py3 to their respective interpreters.

C:\2install>ftype | findstr /r /i "Python"
Python.CompiledFile="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\31\python.exe" "%1" %*
Python.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\31\python.exe" "%1" %*
Python.NoConFile="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\31\pythonw.exe" "%1" %*

C:\2install> assoc .py2=Python2.File
C:\2install> assoc .py3=Python3.File

C:\2install> ftype Python2.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\python.exe" "%1" %*
C:\2install> ftype Python3.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\31\python.exe" "%1" %*
C:\2install> ftype Python.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\python.exe" "%1" %*

C:\2install> ftype Python.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\python.exe" "%1" %*
C:\2install> ftype Python.CompiledFile="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\python.exe" "%1" %*
C:\2install> ftype Python.NoConFile="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\pythonw.exe" "%1" %*


C:\2install>assoc | findstr /r ".py"
.py=Python.File
.py2=Python2.File
.py3=Python3.File
.pyc=Python.CompiledFile
.pyo=Python.CompiledFile
.pyw=Python.NoConFile


C:\2install>ftype | findstr /r /i "Python"
Python.CompiledFile="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\python.exe" "%1" %*
Python.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\python.exe" "%1" %*
Python.NoConFile="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\pythonw.exe" "%1" %*
Python2.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\26\python.exe" "%1" %*
Python3.File="C:\DevFiles\Languages\Python\31\python.exe" "%1" %*

I wonder how many people never knew you could change file associations from the Command Prompt? It is oh so much faster then screwing with Windows Explorer!!! Later on I'll add .pl;.py;.py2;.py;.rb to an environment variable that users can append to their %PATHEXT% at will.



Tools for getting work taken care of next: GIMP, Dia, and Pidgin+GFire plugin. Vim is the only one that I actually care about, but since getting the newest version with all the right features that I want, means compiling my own from a CVS/SVN checkout: it might help if I installed MSVC and CVS first; will get to that later.

Misc office/unproductivity apps: GnuCash, Abiword, Gnumeric, OpenOffice.org, and AutoHotKey. Then remaining non-dev utilities: WinMD5Sum, Qlipboard, Unlocker, GNU PG.

A couple small games: prboom, OpenArena, Battle for Wesnoth, and Chromium BSU; I'll get UrbanTerror, Raven Shield, and SWAT 4 setup later.


And now time for the huge hulking development stuff.... since it'll take at least 15 minutes to download the remaining Microsoft development packages, I started on MinGW, MSYS /w DTK and WATCOM. I usually use Visual C++ for compiling under Win32 whenever possible, but out of respect and potentional handy'ness, I usually keep a copy of Open Watcom around; it also has one of the most polite installers ever created on Windows! Setting up the MSys kits is painless, upgrading them is not always so. MinGW, well just boring to setup 8=). After that came making sure that there is a full Java development kit and Ant available. PHP, PhpDoc, GDB, and Exuberant CTags followed.

Time for the build and scm tools: Ant, CMake, SVN, Git, and CVS.

Next up a few game development related tools: q3map2, QuArk, Wings3D, and Blender.


Wrapping up with an installation of MPlayer & Mencoder binaries (the Git ones) with codecs. Most of the development-related libraries, I don't want installed until Visual C++ is installed, so time to get that done now. Rather then bugger with Daemon Tools Lite, I chose to try out ImDisk, something that appears less intrusive on ones computer experience ;-). After mounting the Visual Studio Express editions DVD ISO, it was a fairly quick bombing run to get C:\DevFiles\Visual Studio\ setup and running; it's still ashame that it forcefully crams a few things into %ProgramFiles%, but I reckon that is the price of an automagic installer 8=).


Ok, time to get the rest of the development stuff setup. First off, Debugging Tools for Windows, followed by the DirectX SDK. The Qt SDK & PyQt4 bindings fell into place, GTK was a simple unzip followed by installing the appropriate Py* packages. WxWidgets is a quick installer, but still needs to be compiled later (per compiler); that can wait until I have need of compiling anything against WxWidgets, which is pretty rare.


As much as I love XML and hate XML parsers, LibXML2 / LibXSLT are just to valuable not to have installed. OpenSSL and ZLib are also kind of useful ^_^. Xerces-C++ and SDL will take a while to compile, so I will save those for later.

I would like to take a few minutes break to get some of the backups restored, while Cygwin goes and fetches a couple things (e.g. rsync).

To be continued...