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.

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Install Cygwin

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.

Post from: EveryJoe

Introducing Cygwin

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 convenient for ‘geeky purposes’ like tweaking with the computer, writing programs, and pushing boundaries.

One feature that strongly separates Windows and Unix-based OSs is the shell. Windows has a command prompt from where various programs can be run using commands. It is more powerful than what most realize but is rarely used. On the contrary, users of Unix-based OSs greatly depend on their very powerful shell (which is run through a computer terminal or console) and run most programs through it.

Users forced to switch to Windows are commonly peeved by the limitations of the command prompt. Nevertheless there is an alternative to make them feel more at home: Cygwin. In fact, there are a few other alternatives, but Cygwin is what I’m very comfortable with and is also, IMHO, more exhaustive than others. Learning Cygwin is very useful even for Windows users to feel more comfortable when they ever encounter Unix-based OSs, or work in a multi-platform environment where you might have to mix Unix with Windows.

From here on, we shall regularly try to learn Cygwin, a nibble at a time. Share this news to your friends who are interested in learning UNIX or Cygwin. We’ll decide on the bite-size based on the community response.

Post from: EveryJoe

Windows, Other Operating Systems, Cygwin