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 …read more

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 …read more

The Windows operating system is very different from most other operating systems. Red Hat Linux, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE share some core philosophies with UNIX, and are thus called Unix-based OSs. In that way, they all follow a common set of standards which are very unlike Windows’ own and that is one of the reasons for the wide-spread anti-Windows sentiment.
Windows is primarily popular for its apparent user-friendliness. Unix-based OSs are chosen for their open and active communities. Windows is sufficient for ‘general purposes’ like listening to songs, playing games, making documents, sending mail, browsing the Internet. Unix-based OSs may seem more …read more