WAMP or XAMPP alternative that has Imagick already included - xampp

Recently lost my hard drive where I had WAMP installed and Imagick working.
Someone else did that part for me way back.
Reinstalling Win7 and getting everything working again = nightmare.
So I installed the latest version of WAMP - NO Imagick.
3 days of trying all the solutions on this site (and some others - sorry) and got nowhere.
Does anyone know of a "one shot" installation that will work out the box?
Maybe a fork of one of them - I looked but found nothing
Or maybe I should install Ubuntu onto an old PC and use that as a web server on my home LAN?
Seriously - they are depreciating the GD library some time soon and Imagick is apparently the successor but no-one supports Imagick natively.
Jumping through all sorts of hoops is no guarantee that it will work either as I have painfully found out.
Thanks in advance people.

WAMP and XAMPP are not up to speed with the transition from the soon to be removed GD library to the ImageMagic library and it would seem that neither are planning to bring their products up to date any time soon.
That leaves many users with a major problem as most web site developers need to be able to manipulate images at some time or another during their work.
For users who are not at a reasonably high level of expertize as far as messing around in the guts of the (in my case, Windows) operating systems, this is a nightmare and can be downright dangerous.
I did find what seemed to be a viable alternative in WampDeveloper Pro but unless you specifically go looking for it, their website is very hush-hush about the fact that its going to cost you over $125 to get it working.
You only find out about this at the first run after installing.
So my options are the following:
Put one of the Ubuntu distributions on a VM
or
Find an old drive, install it into your PC and make the PC dual boot using a Ubuntu distribution.
The second option will "ease" me into converting from Microsoft based OS reliance to a Linux based OS however if that does not work out, I do have the option to create an Ubuntu VM under the Windows system (I have used VM for a while under Windows) and use that in place of the other Windows based web server alternatives.
Either way I will be able to carry on servicing my clients and making a living without spending money or having a stroke due to pure frustration.
I may regret this decision BUT I may start wondering to myself "Now why did you wait so long?"

Related

Is it possible to move an entire Delphi development environment?

I'm working with an old (Delphi 2010) app with a number of very specific components that have to be installed, some from compiled from sources. It's a pain to set up, is what I'm getting at.
Currently, I have it on a Windows 10 machine, but I haven't upgraded Windows 10 in quite some time. If I upgrade Windows, it breaks the debugger (and I haven't been able to fix that so I've downgraded Windows).
I'm trying to find any way to move the Delphi environment without having to go through the various steps to get it to work, like making a VM out of it. Or, if I have to go through the steps again, only do it one more time in such a way that I can push-button recreate it. (There are a lot of things I need to try to upgrade the app itself, but many of those strategies will break the environment for me.)
Any strategies?

Filesharing between OS X & Windows 10 on a htdocs directory?

I had a practical question for my own work at home. I want to use quad monitor for my coding and other work. I can do this with my macbook pro attached to external triple monitor. But it is not practical because of all the cable management and Macbook Pro is barely keeping up with the performance running it. So what I wanted to do was having my PC run triple monitor and my Macbook as forth screen. Code on my pc and share/update the files in the htdocs directory on my OS X. Like how FTP works.
I found this link: http://www.itworld.com/article/2844141/how-to-share-mac-os-x-yosemite-files-with-windows-10.html
But I'm not sure if I will face sudden obstacles in doing this with my htdocs directory or other directories where my work is stored and updated from time to time.(example:Symfony projects)
I hope I mentioned everything. Thanks in advance!
Well, you can use one of the free cloud based, file-sharig service, like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox.
But files will not be updated immediately, you need to wait few seconds (in the best case scenario). So it might get frustrating quickly.
Also, from my experience, OneDrive on Mac is not the best choice when it comes to a Symfony project - it stops working after a while, probably because a lot of cache files, so I need to restart it and it's not usable at all.
Another solution might be using a version control system (f.e. Git) - but you would be able to see the code changes only after a commit and push (and do it manually, of course).

Vagrant box running CentoOS on Windows is really slow - any ideas to speed it up

I have vagrant installed on my Windows 7 machine, currently it has an installation hooked up with VirtualBox & a CentoOS install.
While it everything does work, and the server is all configured and the PHP is running ok it really does seem to crawl. I currently have a development version of Magento on here and it is much much slower than I would expect. Occassionally some pages (the checkout ones) can take up-to 2 minutes to process and bring the user to the next page, obviously this makes development very frustrating and slow.
Can anyone suggest any ideas on the best way to optimise my vagrant box?
p.s i've not set this up myself so i am not fully aware of all its configs/settings etc...
Magento has a lot of files, and Virtualbox file share mechanism between Linux and Windows is very slow. Workaround is to use samba saerver on guest and mount it on host.

Windows XP Embedded install .NET3.0

I'm getting crazy with this problem. I got in my hands a Windows XP embedded and I need to install Framework .NET3.0 and I tried everything in my mind. I've been reading a lot of wXPe and everybody says that you have to take the XPe Rollout 1.0 from your tools and remake the image.
This is my biggest problem, I didn't have any of this tools, I just have a computer with wXPe installed and I need to install my software and I don't have any kind of feedback of who have done it.
I spend a lot of time to understand the ewf and finally I get disabled. But now, I need .NET3.0 and once I get unpacked I can continue with the installation, it seems freezed, I can't continue with the installation.
I've tried to install .NET2.0, it unpacks but suddently stops.
Any idea?! I'm start thinking that is impossible without rebulding the image, but at this time, this is not an option.
Thanks!
Did you manage to get .Net framework installed on your XP Embedded image?
The problem with XP embedded is, if you leave one component out while building your image then some features/programs won't work or install.
I had the same problem with one of my XP embedded images and I figured out that I had to add the .Net framework 2 component in order to install .Net framework 3 on the image. A website I find handy is this one, there's sld's on the website you can use, if you don't have the platform builder, I will be able to help you to build a new image

Moving from XP to Windows 7

This week I’m going to try and start the move from Windows XP to Windows 7 on my development PC at work. I’ve downloaded the Windows Easy Transfer app for going from XP to Win7; that should take care of My Documents. My concern is all of the development environment. In particular I’m concerned about re-establishing things like my Windows services, which host my WCG services, etc. They use TCP and various ports. Plus there are the various ASP.NET apps that are on my machine. What caveats should I be aware of, before I start this?
I deeply don't recommend you to migrate. If I were you, I'd backup these files, format the PC, reinstall everything back again and re-set up the websites. No matter how much pain that may cause, it's still less pain then the potential one you might get if you use this migration tool rather than doing it properly, which would eventually cause you to do the right way anyway.

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