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According to the Cygwin project, XFree86 4.0 already compiles and runs under cygwin without patching, and has for some time. I was very surprised to learn this a few weeks ago; I would think many people would have the same excited reaction, but it's not a well-publicized part of the Cygwin project.

(PostgreSQL 7.1 also compiles under cygwin without patches. Cygwin rocks.)

cygwin rocks. If your boss forces you to develop on Windows NT, just install cygwin and suddenly it is a Unix development environment! Beautiful.

Likewise, if you are developing a GPL-compatible application and you want it to run on Windows as well as on Unix, just compile it with cygwin and ship it! (If it is not GPL-compatible, then you have to buy a license from Cygnus. An interesting business model.)

Cygwin is very mature. I was using it 18 months ago for full-time development environment on Windows NT 4.

Regards,

Zooko

I use bash on my windows box daily (along with sed, awk, gmake, uname, find, file, RCS-5.7, telnet, in.telnetd, and a host of other common tools).

Ever heard of Cygwin? It's a pretty damned fine piece of kit. It understands the way UNIX people work, and all that Windows stupidity at the same time. Brilliant, I say.

Wes

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It's called Cygwin, in case you didn't know already.

Okay, this seems to me like a pretty damn pointless application, the sort of thing that programmers churn out just to practice their programming skills rather than produce anything truly useful.

Think about it - you can already get most of the essential Linux tools over at Cygwin if you're after better command line tools. Otherwise, what does Linux have to offer? Most Linux software is perpetual alphaware or just a rehash of other projects (witness the truly scary number of CD front-ends out there). These programs already have free native Windows equivalents out there, and the Windows ones have often been in development longer (the big Linux bandwagon wasn't all that long ago) and can take advantage of Windows features.

And out of the few open sourced packages that are approaching professional quality, many of them are already available on Windows, like Apache. Sure there's the GIMP, but Windows users using Photoshop aren't going to want to change, and PaintShop Pro is pretty much the package of choice for low-end use.

I just don't see that there's any real use for this.

Cygwin It's a POSIX layer for win32. Bash, ksh, and so on have been ported to it, as have many many unix tools..

They even have an Xfree86 port coming along nicely.

There is a free download version. You can only write GPL'ed programs with it because it links in code released under the GPL (whose viral nature means it can only be used with free (speech) software; the commercial version comes with a library licensed for both free (beer?) and non-free commercial software) ... I have no problem with that, I applaud Borland for coming up with an interesting way to support free software development while still maintaining some intellectual property.

This is an interesting combination of Perl's dual license (GPL and Artistic) and the approach Cygnus took. They ported gcc to Windows NT/2000 (it mostly also works on 95/98/ME), and included a GPL'ed C runtime library. (This, plus a bunch of ported GNU software, is Cygwin.) This "infects" your application, so it can only be used to develop free (speech) software. Cygnus also implemented an alternative C runtime library, which they licensed as non-free, commercial software ... which could be used to distribute other non-free commercial software.

(Or they used to. A quick search of the Red Hat's site seems to show they now only do this for embedded software.)

How would you compare the UWIN and Cygwin projects?

There's the Cygwin project which has a complete set of GNU tools for Windows, but IMHO their version of Bash sucks in a major way - it sets up an odd directory structure which makes navigating around a disk a pain for one.

The best one I've used is the MKS Toolkit which also provides a complete set of UNIX tools for Windows. Unfortunately, it's just not free...

That and more has already been done. Check out the Cygwin Tools. I installed them on my Windows 2000 box at work and now I have bash, vim, grep, sed, awk, and many more Unix tools working on my Windows machine. It's a very powerful addition to a Windows development environment. When I'm developing in Visual Studio, I can click on a button on the toolbar, pull up the source file I'm hacking on in Vim, do powerful search and replaces using regex's. Or I can pop up a bash session and do greps or run bash scripts I've written. I love it.
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I'd like to see more Fuzz results. Maybe I'm just a benchmark nut, but I'd like to see some more real benchmarks. I always liked the BYTEMarks over whatever Intel was pushing this week, too...

Maybe if they used Fuzz to test the Cygwin utilities, versus the regular NT (DOS) utilities?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

So get XFree86 for Win32.

http://www.cygwin.com/

I bought the Interix POSIX subsystem for NT

Of course, if you just want sed, you can get standalone DOS or Windows versions.

sshd and scp running under cygwin is the easiest way to do this. Works fine. See their web site for more details. Cygwin is GPL software.

You can already run Linux on Windows, using VMWare. I'm running Linux on WinNT4 right now. You can download an eval. They have a $99 hobbyist price, too.

Also, Cygwin provides a good implementation of the GNU tools on Windows, which lets you run GCC and compile and run lots of open source stuff.