I was going to recommend Cygwin as well but I am beginning to wonder why you are even running Windows in the first place... Seems like you want *nix with a VirtualBox Windows VM for occasional use. -- ravi
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You were not around for the nightmare of changing IPs to ATT because of cheaper and faster rates, and then get told by ATT minimum wage tech support that they didn't support Linex systems (which turned out to be a probable lie). It was on me to figure it out. So I had to go hat in hand to the IP guy I had unsubscribed from and had used for more than a decade to sort out the problem. Once I got the device name number stuff cleared up, I had to install some part of PPPOE which wasn't part of the base Ubunto install. I had configured Ubunto to old style fixed addresses, not DHCP and no PPPOE facility.
So I went to use the installer for some bits and pieces, and found my older version of Ubunto wasn't supported. They are on a 6 month version cycle and drop most of their versions in 18mons, except one that is selected for the long haul. I finally found the then current supported version pasted the 18mon cut-off. I saved it to CD for later.
I was already out of my depth. So I gave up. I may go back to *nix world some day. Right now I just want something that works with the community org office system. Simple. Open Office sounds good enough. I've gotten used to the limited Emacs and I can use the LaTeX distribution well enough. All I really use these for is a journal. I got up to speed enough to flow text into the book document class and started using some of the chapter and sections for a structured book. The structured book is an interesting system that fit well with the Strauss project. Right now I am mulling over going back to it. Strauss used something like this structure to do his philosophy, but he didn't understand or maybe he was against its implicit Kantianism.
Right now I have believable material from David Harvey on the early origins of neoliberalism that goes back to the late forties when Hayek and Popper were putting together a general prospectus. Since the book is structured, I can re-write the intro with the Harvey material and footnote the current material and thereby change the emphasis from news and popular accounts to the more academically sound material Harvey provides. This will come in handy when Strauss arrives in the US and sides with the proto-neocons against the liberal wing of Arendt et al. in NYC in the late thirties through the forties. The deeper cultural stuff is hard to explain, but it amounts to a change from the 1930s more authentic American working class literatures to the more sophisticated radicalism of the German academics.
Why mainstream book publishers never used the TeX and later LaTeX system is completely beyond me. LaTeX on XP took me a week to learn well enough, one fucking week. In expert hands, it would take minutes for the first rough copy. The only people who seem to use this system are big league astronomy, physics, and math academics. None of the biosciences. Forget about fiction, or humanities, let alone political philosophy.
Now to get all postmodern...I am not sure people really understand that the structure of a book seriously effects the structure of the text. It's that Lego thing, modules and such....that create buildings and building complexes, then cities, and then societies.
CG
ps. I going to feed my Wire addiction tonight and put it on the plastic. Seeing it twice has only an improvement of understanding. This is really classical american literature.