CUCC Expedition Handbook - Your Windows laptop

Setting up an Expo laptop - using Microsoft Windows

A work in progress.

It used to be quite simple - software equivalents existed for Windows for everything we needed. The new (since Spring 2018) requirement to make ssh keys obligatory has simply added an extra step for most things, but has made one thing (rsync) really quite hard to get working.

• Things that already work well with a Windows laptop
  - Editing the handbook webpages, typing up SVX files and transcribing the logbook,
  - Anything where the file-transfer to the expo surver is via the version control software (TortoiseHg or Git-for-Windows)
• Things that cause problems
  - filenames and unintentional duplication because hardlinks are not understood by Windows,
  - sFTP or scp for more than a handful of files
• Things that are really, really hard
  - using rsync
  - large-scale updating of several folders at once on expofiles without overwriting other people's work (which means using rsync)

Things that already work well

Anytihng to

Things that cause problems

Linux people like to use hard-links: where there is really only one file, but it is referred to by different names. The ones you are most likely to come across are that what looks like /home/expo/expoweb is really just a link to /home/expo/repositories/hg/expoweb, and that expoweb/essentials.gpx is a link to /home/expo/expofiles/gpslogs/essentials/essentials2019.gpx

Things that are really, really hard

The core problem is integrating the PuTTy key management software (pagent.exe) with a terminal window.

WSL: the Windows Subsystem for Linux. The first release of this didn't do the ssh key exchange process easily. The 2019 WSL2 release includes a complete Linux kernel. If you want to use this, then please do - and then write the handbook documentation too. But beware that it has two different modes which behave differently.