What are good linux programming environments for windows?

"Did you consider using Cygwin? I didn't test this myself but there are several resources mentioning this combo:

Get Cygwin => Rails Wiki
Setting up Rails on Windows with Cygwin
Ruby on Rails Development in Windows via Cygwin
Rails Development and Cygwin on Windows XP"

If you want Linux on Windows without virtualization, that sounds like coLinux to me.

"I'd try to find another PC to put Ubuntu on. A relatively older one should run it fine.

You can join them together and share the keyboard/mouse with win2vnc or x2vnc."

You may be able to tweak VirtualBox to speed it up significantly. If you have a recent CPU, you can enable VT-x (Intel) or AMD-V, and possibly also nested paging. If your processor supports both of these, you should see a significant speed increase. As mentioned by others, you could always try making linux less demanding - use a lighter window manager, or use a distro like DSL or Puppy linux.

"I've found virtualizing Windows XP pretty sluggish with a full dev environment running, but maybe that's just because I do that for Flex development which requires Flex Builder which almost instantly consumes all of my VM's allocated RAM. Virtualization is really demanding on your hardware, my next build is going to have 16GB of RAM so that I can virtualize in peace.

I think it would be faster to run a minimal Linux distro like Arch in VirtualBox and use that for running the servers and things like the console commands that generate your skeletons. I use git for all my source control and just push and pull from a remote repo to share code between my VMs, it's just easier that way than setting up something special.

Good luck. I think this approach is much more reliable and straightforward than cygwin or other POSIX implementations on Windows; it generally takes significant fiddling to get those things to work correctly for more than a couple of applications, and I assume if you're going to be running a server you'll have some issues with it."