What is Cygwin?

Cygwin is a suite of Unix style tools (including many compilers and the BASH command line parser or shell) ported to the NT/Win2K environment. It also includes an extensive function library.

The main motivation for installing it is the Java Development Environment (JDE) requires it. JDE runs inside of Emacs.

Another motivation is for C++ development -- it provides nearly all of the commonly used features that the pricey Microsoft development environment provides.

Lastly, it makes a lot of the features of Emacs work!

Installation

  1. Install Cygwin by running this setup.exe to get bash, UNIX utilities and the GNU Compiler collection for Windows. This appears to download everything! 
    1. It will ask for a download site. I picked yggdrasil.com. Some sites are bad choices because they will crash.
    2. It will ask where to install it. Use the default. I think you have to create the Cygwin directory. (This assumes you have already installed Emacs in a directory called "c:\GNU_Utilities" (formerly called "c:\GNU Utilities"). If not, create such a directory now.)
    3. It might need a directory called c:\tmp so be sure and use the MD c:\tmp command to accommodate it.
    4. Run the installation procedure and specify the installation directory.
      1. On Angel I was paranoid after the awful experience with the Oracle installation not being able to handle the space in "program files" so I put it under the default.
      2. In the future, continue to let it use the default..
    5. Examine the file cygnus.bat. Here is the example from \\FAFNIR that was installed with the old directory name of "c:\GNU Utilities". @ECHO OFF SET MAKE_MODE=UNIX SET PATH=c:\GNUUTI~1\cygnus\bin;%PATH% Notice how the installation procedure grabbed the installation directory and converted the directory names to 8.3 format with the tilde's? This is the old DOS convention that allows legacy software to deal with long file names (legacy DOS software was only prepared to deal with 8 character file names followed by a period and a 3 character extension). Update the environment variables with these new symbols:
      1.  MAKE_MODE=UNIX and
      2. the new entry in the path variable with (in the example of FAFNIR "c:\GNU_Utilities\cygwin\bin").

Installing Services

See c:/cygwin/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/sysvinit.README

  1. Install sysvinit
    init-config
  2. Install Secure Shell 
    1. ssh-host-config
    2. net start sshd
  3. Installing Cron

    I could not find any documentation on this, but a google search revealed the following:

    Roy,
On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 12:48:47PM -0400, roypgsqlcygwin ( at ) xemaps ( dot ) com wrote:
> BTW, does cygwin itself run as some background application (service) in NT?

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 12:51:46PM -0400, roypgsqlcygwin ( at ) xemaps ( dot ) com wrote:
> Whoops!  Forgot to read the README at /usr/doc/cygwin/cron.README

Did you forget to read the README again?

    $ fgrep cygrunsrv /usr/doc/cygwin/cron.README
    cygrunsrv. Install as service like that:
            cygrunsrv -I cron -p /usr/sbin/cron -a -D

Or, did you just forgot to start the service?

    $ net start cron

Problems

Cygwin BASH uses a different approach than Emacs to device designators. For example, emacs uses d:/directory_name and Cygwin uses //d/directory_name.

Documentation

The documentation is not great.

  1. Unix/Linux Commands
 

 

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