Adventures With Cygwin
Created: 10 January 2006 Modified:Originally published on chrislynch.info website.
I have been working with Cygwin over the last couple of weeks. It is a unix emulator that you run in a windows environment. A poorly documented, but interesting feature is that it uses windows users, groups and filesystem to handle security. Also interesting is that you can run X-windows on Microsoft windows. It probably takes up to much memory to be really practical but if you are dying to run an X-windows app on your Microsoft OS….
Cygwin comes with a setup utility that will download and install its components. A key point to keep in mind is that different download sites have different “flavors” of Cygwin. I only tried two or three but I was happy enough with the one from ftp://cygwin.osuosl.org that I didn’t look at any others. It installed several X-windows applications including a few games. The unix emulation works well and you can search/manipulate your MS Windows files, drives and directories using Unix commands.
I did have some difficulties getting a couple of applications to work correctly. The default Apache HTTP server installs did not work at all for me. So I uninstalled them and downloaded and installed Apache HTTP Server 1.34 from source. It went surprisingly smoothly and to get the server running all that was really needed was to change the httpd.conf file so that it referenced my user name as the name the server would run under.
The other application was Gnome. I tried to get it running under Cygwin and was completely unsuccessful. I believe its possible to get it running with enough of a time investment, but why bother when an X-windows installation can be done in minutes?
So now I am doing Perl CGI programming on my windows box using an Apache/Perl intallation in the Cygwin Environment. Pretty Neat!
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