Glueing together Cygwin’s odds and ends to make life on your Linux-by-way-of-Windows desktop more comfortable.
Cygwin: Changing the Face of Windows
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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try colinux. http://www.colinux.org
There is nothing Linux about Cygwin. Linux != Unix.
When I was a sophomore, one of our CS classes required us to use Cygwin for our C++ development. Cygwin was constantly bombing in the lab and on most people’s home machines. Thank God for MacOS X, it’s what saved me. I was able to do my work on my Mac, compile it in Cygwin and turn it in.
There’s nothing unix about it either. Cygwin tries to implement that POSIX standard on win32 but fails.
why not forget the hassle and just pop in any one of the numerous live cds out there? your good to go in 30 seconds. and when your shift is over, just pop out the cd.
The problem there is that I need access to my Windows apps at work. So I currently use Cygwin for my sysadmin work, and Windows for my office droid work.
It’s kind of a crude solution, though (Cygwin is more than a little buggy). I’m thinking of just switching to using my Mac. Running Windows on VirtualPC in OS X is a lot cleaner than trying to run an ersatz Linux on top of Windows.
Tried coLinux when it came out. Liked it but it wasn´t very useful for me. But it must be great for labs in OS classes since the system you work on is just a file you can backup etc. Easy to backtrace if you screw up.
Try writing large threaded applications in it. Not. It is a piece of junk. Nuf said. Good for development school tasks though where only simple POSIX-like apps are required and/or the users are still not too sure about letting go of the Windows ball and chain.
I hope he gets sacked. His employer pays for the internet connection and has every right to limit where you can go and what you can do for it.
Bypassing security measures as he has should be grounds for automatic dismissal
Cygwin is REQUIRED to build Mozilla (and Firefox), as well as OpenOffice.org at all on Windows. I don’t call that junk.
How is Cygwin required if people don’t need any (special) shared libraries installed to run Firefox?
Hello? I said Cygwin is required to BUILD. Have you built Mozilla or OOo?
Check their build instruction pages. It is required.
Kon said: “It is a piece of junk. Nuf said. Good for development school tasks though where only simple POSIX-like apps are required and/or the users are still not too sure about letting go of the Windows ball and chain.”
So, are Moz and OOo “school tasks”? That doesn’t make sense, no?
Of course, people don’t need Cygwin to run Moz or OOo. But without Cygwin, there won’t be any installer to install Moz and OOo on Windows in the first place.
Or maybe there is, in the alternative universe where Cygwin doesn’t exist. But in that case Moz and OOo people would need to maintain separate build process for Windows, which will get out of sync with other platforms, be source of obscure bugs, and if they are to port current Cygwin-based system to use only non-Cygwin tools, it will take lots and lots of man-hours.
So, Cygwin as a build environment on Windows is very useful, and has a solid place.
With Cygwin you get a working shell for Windows
You *completely* missed my point. Using it as a build environment and using it as a production host environment are two very different things. Also, please refrain from attempting to use sarcasm.
A better idea would just to be run Linux with VMware workstation. It provides much better performance and better POSIX standards compliance, and is an easier migration.
I am using cygwin all the time:
– to ssh our integration stage (deploy, start/stop nimius, tomcat, weblogic…), windows backend (but I use sometimes remote desktop only if i have no alternative)
– to extract data from cvs using ANT build scripts in eclipse
– we are using bash file under windows xp instead of bat files (.bat are crap)
– tail, grep, sed, find are great tool, you know what I mean 🙂
Any serious developer need cygwin…
I’ve used Microsoft SFU (does the same job as Cygwin, but is from MS) for various things and it works pretty well. It’s much more like UNIX than Linux is, so you might not be used to that.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/default.asp
and it’s not the only one out there – there’s UWin from AT&T, available under the CPL, and a heap of other stuff.
I’ve got one MS Windows machine, running Win95, and MinGW keeps me sane.
Cygwin with X is great. I had it installed for while with xfce4 installed in the cygwin environment. It worked great and reasonably fast too.
I used it, so I wouldn’t have to buy a 3270 emulator for windows, but could use x3270 instead. Not to mention that you finally get a decent shell.
I regularly build Mozilla with Microsoft SFU. It’s not hard to set up. Replace make with gnumake and a few other changes and you’re building in no time.
But in reality any Unixy toolchains will do the job.
Plent of ’em exist, from various ports of GNU, Microsoft SFU (I’ve never used this, but I thought this was based on Cygwin), NextSTEP wrappers ofton include a Unixy toolchain and native Win32 replacement applications (a few reimplementations of AWK exist). So why do I use Cygwin? No idea.
What a pointless post.
So long as the running apps don’t require special libraries supplied by Cygwin only (and they don’t, I’m running Firefox now and I never use Cygwin), then you don’t need Cygwin to build it. (and you would then only be able to run it out of the Cygwin shell, if you needed libsomething.so.x, etc)
Just because their instructions use Cygwin doesn’t mean its required. As stated before, you can use Visual Studio or many other methods to build them.
I use cygwin all the time. Its truly great product on windows. Not only that i get a good working bash shell and other utilities on windows, i also get many cool features like ssh deamon. Now i can ssh into my Windows box from remotely like Linux.
This really fills the gap between linux and windows.
Keep on doing the good work cygwin team and with the addition of X to it, i am now able to even run KDE on windows and trust me it is fast. I run it on a PIII 733 MHz machine with 256 MB RAM, Windows XP and cygwin with KDE and its still pretty fast.
>- we are using bash file under windows xp instead of bat files (.bat are crap)
Yes, my point excatly!
I use cygwin all the time for ssh, scp, and bash. It makes life much easier working with remote systems to just be able to use bash.
Then there is stuff like:
find . -mmin -120 -exec grep -i DATA {} ; -print
that can find data in a huge directory and grab only those from the last 2 hours and look for the word DATA and print the file name if it is there. This is just too hard to do with Windows alone.
Or how about:
cat file | cut -d: -f3-5 | sort | uniq -c | sort -r
that can count the number of duplicated in fields 3, 4 and 5 from a file and place the most common ones first.
This kind of stuff cost about $1000/user with MKS toolkit if I am not mistaken.
Not to mention being able to use cron, interact with NTFS ACLs, the ability to create loopback mounts easily, etc., etc.
mount -t “c:Documents and SettingsmeDesktop” /desktop
cd /desktop
Skip across the network with
cd //server/c$/dir
Find the newest 10 files with
ls -lt | head
and on and on, the list is just huge – postgres, bz2, ImageMagick, vim, not to mention perl, python, php, ruby, c, c++, ada, pascal, prolog … geez.
What more could you want on Windows?
“Just because their instructions use Cygwin doesn’t mean its required. As stated before, you can use Visual Studio or many other methods to build them.”
Shoot! You proved me that you’ve never tried building, nor read instruction at all.
Moz and OOo build requires (as per instruction) BOTH Visual Studio and Cygwin! What are you smoking?
My day at work would be much more painful without Cygwin. Lotus Notes is just about the only native Windows app that is use. I spend the rest on my time in X with KDE as my desktop Running X with no decorations make it even more immersive. When will Microsft implement virtual desktops in the base system? They are always so behind the times.
I would be nice if the fish: or sftp: IOSlaves worked but at least ftp: does.
I would say that Cygwin’s ability to run something as complex as KDE relatively well deserves kudos to be given to its developers.
For those that think it is/was slow, it now runs faster and better than it did in the past. Give it another try.
Very nice tips, thank you!
BTW can you spell the mount tip again for me? It doesn’t work after trying some different syntax commands.
Is it just me or is the http://www.cygwin.com site down after this article 😉
The X server under cygwin is great and definately improves my productivity since I can run both M$ apps (face it, open office still does not cut it, but its getting better) and do real work with real shells. I even build some windows software using M$ compiler with make under cygwin, especially good when doing builds remotely.
However, the installer is painful and if people ask me for the easiest way to get a UNIX shell or NFS client on Windows, SFU wins hands down.
Secondly, I know it must be frustrating trying support open source software sometimes, but I have never seen such arrogant, aggressive, unhelpful comments than on the cygwin mailing lists from the cygwin developers. I would like to say well done, its not perfect (installer, access controls etc) but it works most of the time, but please cut the attitude.