Fire up a terminal window.
For a text editor, type
vi. For a C compiler, you've got
gcc. I'm not too sure how Lindows goes about giving you such tools, but with most of the other major Linux distributions, these tools are usually installed - and if not can be found on the distro media. For development, you'll need the appropriate libraries and devel packages installed too. Again, most good distros come with literally 1000's of packages (development, editors, office tools, terminals, configuration utilities, etc, etc) and can be installed on demand. You'll also get a huge suite of command line utilities encompassing a superset of the Unix tools and utilities.
I know Lindows comes with some "Click 'n' Run" subscription based shenanigans, not too sure how it works though.
You can always D/L software from
www.gnu.org www.freshmeat.net www.sourceforge.net and other places - you can always search
www.google.com for anything else you want.
The point I made about charging round as "root" is if you are using the terminal, screw up your wildcard expansion when issuing an rm -r, you can traverse the whole filesystem and obliterate your installation.
Cheers
ZB
(NOT a fan of Lindows!
)