Packaging a Python script on Linux into a Windows executable

I have a Python script that I’d like to compile into a Windows executable. Now, py2exe works fine from Windows, but I’d like to be able to run this from Linux. I do have Windows on my development machine, but Linux is my primary dev platform and I’m getting kind of sick of rebooting into Windows just to create the .exe. Nor do I want to have to buy a second Windows license to run in a virtual machine such as VirtualBox. Any ideas?

Ensure a single instance of an application in Linux

I’m working on a GUI application in WxPython, and I am not sure how I can ensure that only one copy of my application is running at any given time on the machine. Due to the nature of the application, running more than once doesn’t make any sense, and will fail quickly. Under Win32, I can simply make a named mutex and check that at startup. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any facilities in Linux that can do this.

How to limit the heap size?

I sometimes write Python programs which are very difficult to determine how much memory it will use before execution. As such, I sometimes invoke a Python program that tries to allocate massive amounts of RAM causing the kernel to heavily swap and degrade the performance of other running processes.

Linux command-line call not returning what it should from os.system?

I need to make some command line calls to linux and get the return from this, however doing it as below is just returning 0 when it should return a time value, like 00:08:19, I am testing the exact same call in regular command line and it returns the time value 00:08:19 so I am confused as to what I am doing wrong as I thought this was how to do it in python.