Windows Based Dev Env

Wayne Salamonsen

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Sep 22, 2025, 8:31:26 AM (10 days ago) Sep 22

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I've been looking into helping out in this community a little and have been trying to work out the best way to do development and builds.

The problem is my main home machine is a windows based box (I've managed to get it building at my work on a mac, but given it's not work I won't be doing much on it there) I was wondering what the best options were.

I realise from the dev notes that no one suggested building or trying to build on windows due to the lack of package management.

So I was wondering about a linux based VM to run on the windows box to do the build. Has anyone tried that and if so any suggestions on what works well and any pitfalls to avoid?

I can change my windows machine to dual boot, but I'd rather avoid that if I can.

Jason Bramwell

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Sep 22, 2025, 11:08:14 AM (10 days ago) Sep 22

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A Linux virtual machine running inside something like VirtualBox should be easy to set up and will leave your main computer alone so it’s fully reversible should you want to clean up.

That will get you a development environment the most similar to what most of the devs use.

Jason

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On 22 Sep 2025, at 15:31, Wayne Salamonsen <wsala...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been looking into helping out in this community a little and have been trying to work out the best way to do development and builds.

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Michael Keller

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Sep 22, 2025, 1:58:21 PM (10 days ago) Sep 22

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Hi Wayne.

VirtualBox running an image of your favourite flavour of linux will definitely work. Or even using the built in 'Windows Subsystem for Linux' (WSL2) will work for most development tasks.
Where it gets a bit tricky is when it comes to testing downloads from dive computers. But even this might be feasible if the connection is done through an USB based serial port / bluetooth adaptor, and VirtualBox is configured to exclusively 'own' the respective USB device.