Introducing Cygwin

Previously, I wrote that Cygwin provides an alternative to the windows shell, makes Unix-lovers feel more at home with Windows and vice-versa. That is only the partial truth.

The truth is Cygwin emulates Linux on Windows. If you replace the Windows background with any of the open-source wallpapers, hide the Windows task bar, and only run the cygwin terminal, you can almost cheat yourself that you’re running a Unix-based OS. This is thanks to a DLL named cygwin1.dll which is the actual Linux API emulation layer.

Cygwin is different from other utility packages providing Unix-like functionality like, say, UnxUtils because of the emulation layer. Cygwin is not using the native Windows libraries directly for Unix-like utilities. That could mean a difference in the speeds of their execution, but we are not benchmarking anything here. This works better to learn Unix-based OSs.

There are also a number of Linux packages that can be installed on Cygwin after rebuilding them from source. These are the Windows-alternatives to the corresponding Linux tools and are not always available on utility packages that are similar to UnxUtils.

You can download the Cygwin setup file from their home page. We’ll run through the installation next time; it should work on most Windows OSs except Windows CE (handheld). I’ve heard about Cygwin-Vista compatibility issues but that could mean errors here and there and not complete incompatibility.