How to Install Cygwin

Installing Cygwin is straightforward, but those who haven’t installed any UNIX-based OSs before may be lost at the last step. So here are the steps:

1. Download the Cygwin setup file, if you haven’t already.

2. Choose the installation type: Install from Internet or Install from Local Directory or Download without Installing. When installing Cygwin for the first time, you’ll have to choose either the first or the last option unless you already have the packages through some other means. I tend to choose the last for two reasons. One, network issues while downloading are preferrable to network issues while installing. Two, a reinstall for whatever reason is faster and smoother from a local directory. However, this will consume a few hundred MB to just download. Disk space these days isn’t an issue anyway.

3. Choose the root directory. I’ll talk about this structure later. Default options usually suffice, but if you have to choose, choose a new empty folder in a drive with several hundred MB disk space, say, E:\cygwin.

4. Even if you’re installing from the Internet directly, a few logs with setup-related information are created during installation. These logs are important for the setup file to recognize the existing states of various packages. Specify where you want these logs to reside in.

5. Choose a mirror that is closest to your location, or just pick any.

6. This is the major step, of choosing the packages. You could simply skip this step, whereby the default base packages will be installed. To experiment more, it will be worth your time to browse through these packages and select a few additional ones. Dependencies like underlying packages and libraries are selected automatically when you choose a package.

There are five modes of View: Category/Full/Partial/Up To Date/Not Installed. Choose the “Category” mode. Every package has a line of info written about it to the right. That should give an idea. I’ll mention the packages being used in the future posts where and when required.

The next step will end the process. If you’re first downloading the packages from the Internet, then you will have to rerun the Cygwin setup file, this time with the “Install from Local Directory” option and let all those packages downloaded be installed.

We’ll use Cygwin, starting with customizing the terminal from next week.

Image Source: Cygwin screenshot from my PC.