[Wolves] Bash/Linux on Windows

[chris procter]

 --- trig <wolves at trig.org.uk> wrote: 
> I was thinking of using
> cygwyn.. Has anyone here
> had any exposure to it? What is it like? Does anyone
> have a decent HOW-TO
> for it? 

I've used it for years (since the 20th century) and it
works well. Ever since discovering it my first task
when getting a new windows machine is always to
install cygwin.

It was started in the 80's by the first free software
company cygnus to ease porting unix software to
windows (which was their business) and has been in
development since then, cygnus was bought be Redhat a
few years ago  but they have kept development going so
its as solid as windows software can be.

It gives you a list of all the normal Gnu command line
tools, gcc, python, perl, awk, libraries, etc plus
stuff like Xwindows (which runs rootless or in its own
window) and apache and installs the ones you select
into C:\cygwin, and puts a menu item for a bash
command prompt in the start menu. You then start bash
and enjoy being able to ls and grep and type "cd
/home/Administrator" with your slashes the right way
round.

Problems:-
If you want to use a specific piece of software with
it make sure it has a cygwin port before you start,
linux software probably wont work out of the box on
cygwin (the gnu objective c compiler for example), on
the bright side pretty much all the common bits of
unix software have been ported over the course of the
last 10 years.
Its big. Hundreds of meg and tens of thousands of
files for a full install, dont do it on a 56k modem.

As an aside, at my previous employer we needed a mass
mailer to send out a newsletter by email our crack VB
developer spent days putting together and tuning a
multi-threaded, optomised, supercharged solution that
would send out as many emails a second as he could
possible get it, and was very proud, as an experiment
I then put together a 5 line shell script under cygwin
using a while loop, the mail command, and a couple of
files to hold the email and the address list, it ran
twice as fast as the vb app. He refused to talk to me
for the rest of the day.

chris



	
	
		
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