Slashdot Mirror

I think it can be argued that Windows + cygwin != Windows.

Well, it isn't exactly Lindows either ;) I have used Cygwin for a long time, and while it is pretty handy, it will not compile everything and has serious limitations. I still love it and find it useful, but its not a substitute for a Linux environment. You can run sshd in Cygwin, but there are still some limitations. Also, I find that PUTTY is easier to ssh and sftp with, rather than cygwin's ports of ssh and sftp. The Perl windows port is a bit handier than Perl in Cygwin also, for local machine tasks.

Cygwin is the next best thing to a Linux install, but it is far from being the same thing.

you can't program sh*t on a windows install without buying separate software.

• TECHNICAL - things that are difficult-to-impossible for MS-Windows without "special equipment". Stuff like Xnest and User Mode Linux, which are boons for testing end-user and kiosk style applications, or the so-called Backstreet Ruby console project, which allows multiple independent users on one piece of hardware (e.g. two users on a multihead Radeon card). Stuff like "Terminal Services" and DAVfs being intrinsic to the system.
  
• POLITICAL - things like the absence of spyware, a licence agreement which says "if you break it you own both pieces" rather than one which says "your computer is now My Computer", being invented everywhere rather than in [insert name of favourite foreign imperialist infidel country here] - if The Boss drives a Citroën, start with "Where does it come from? France, Finland, Australia, [blah blah long list of places blah]. Oh, and did I mention France?" You can update piecemeal, or more or less at your own speed; since you have all of the pieces, a sizeable organisation could easily afford to settle on a distro and maintain it themselves ad infinitum by updating versions or patching at their discretion.
  
• FINANCIAL - Pretty dang obvious. Pay per user, per cpu, per port, or just for the support you need? Hmmm... let me think, this is a toughie...
  
• ANYTHING BUT MICROSOFT - sad but true. Probably 10% of conversions have this as their primary justification.
  
• CUSTOMISABLE - dislike a feature? Don't just disable it (only to have a user figure out a bypass later), get out your handy-dandy software saw and lop that horrid thing right off!

If you ignore windows ports of other GNU applications...
@ real networking tools, such as nmap...
@ a powerful command prompt...

Of course the solution set looks pretty small, after you've arbitrarily eliminated half of it. Nothing's stopping you from downloading Cygwin.

@ compilers! you can't program sh*t on a windows install without buying separate software.

Sure you can.

@ your choice of how your desktop environment looks
@ games, not just freecell and solitaire

Try Google. There are plenty of free games and skinning tools out there.

Microsoft doesn't put all this stuff on a CD and put it in the box with Windows, but that doesn't mean that these programs don't exist, or aren't useful. The only advantage GNU/Linux has is a distro that throws everything and KitchenSink 3.1, with sources, onto a DVD-ROM, like SuSE's Professional package. But that doesn't quite raise GNU/Linux to the level of superiority you suggest.

OTOH, the availability of source in the first place does give Linux quite a lift. :-)

Howso? Various incarnations of gcc have existed for Windows NT/2000 for years. Cygwin and MinGW have both been available for years.

If all you wanted was gcc, then those are a heck of a lot more digestable than a full Linux distribution just to get vi and gcc.

I have developed many systems running in DOS. A TSR will do pretty good when task scheduling isn't a big problem. But I do miss a good command interpreter. It's much quicker to write "ls *", rather than setting up the structures and calling the functions that read a directory in C. Wait... Is there Perl for freeDOS?

Then just use Linux, or if you strongly prefer Windows, use Cygwin. I use both equally. Perl is a standard package in Cygwin (have to select it, tho) or you can install Perl in Windows with several different binary ports.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with Cygwin (cygwin.com), its a Unix like environment for Windows. It takes up one directory and if you put the ../bin directory in your path, you can use the utilities in a Win9x/XP command prompt. Its called as a batch file, and its like SSHing into your own machine. it has a virtual directory structure that gives you full access to your whole drive or its own / structure under its windows path (safe), and most of the useful Unix utilities.

The setup program lets you install Perl, GCC, plus other languages and compilers, and even an Xserver, although my luck with that is not so good. Even if you are a Windows only user, its a great way to get introduced to a fairly powerful shell, with several options like tch and bash, without the problems of a dual boot.

It is NOT "Linux in Windows", its a set of APIs to be able to compile and run many Linux programs from source, with just a few mouse clicks to install the most common programs. Find it here. It's Free.

GnuMeric, as with the rest of GNOME 1.4 or KDE 3.1.4, runs just fine on Windows when compiled in the Cygwin Linux API implementation. You can also use Cygwin as a host for XFree86, this is the only way to get a free, fully featured X-server on Windows.

References.
Cygwin homepage
Gnome 1.4 apps for Cygwin
Cygwin Gnome homepage
KDE on Cygwin homepage

Cygwin is a brilliant tool to help manage a migration from Windows to Linux. I don't know why we dont hear of it more.

I don't think VNC can currently do anything like this, although I recall hearing it as a feature they might work towards.

Of course, this won't help if the app you want to export is running no a remote windows server, but it would work just the same for client machines is running X on *nix.

Where in the windows version?

Where in the windows version?

ncftp - best FTP client EVAR.

wget - awesome HTTP/HTTPS/FTP download tool (need to mirror a site? wget's got you covered).

lftp - best sftp client EVAR.

zip and unzip - so very useful (and I used to maintain several of the OS ports).

I was going to include bash, but it hasn't actually been updated since 2002.

Cygwin isn't really an application per-se, but it's always the second or third thing (after Firefox) that I install on a new Windows box... having a real shell and tools on Windows is a real sanity-saver.

It is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack and acorn route but Evolution works perfectly under colinux.

I use colinux to run gentoo (other distros are available), and cygwin to add XWindow support. You also need to follow the instructions to get networking working and then you can just :

emerge evolution

Admittedly this is a lot of setup work but once it is working it is not obvious that evolution isn't a native port. The other benefit is you can use the same setup to run any Linux programs under Windows (though image editing or 3D programs would be very slow)

Err pasted the same as that of X-Win32
Cygwin/X

(Karma be damned; I am no better than an AC anyway)

After all everyone already knows my @yahoo.com email address.

I hope that's not the only reason you don't migrate to another e-mail service. With fetchyahoo, I forwarded all my Yahoo mail to my new address, so that I was able to catch all the people and mailing lists that hadn't started using my new address. I ran fetchyahoo as a cron job on a Linux server; if you are tied to Windows, you could probably run in under Cygwin.

There's very few things Linux will do that Windows won't. But Windows holds the dominant market share and has a lot more commercial support. That's why I (mostly) use Windows.

That's interesting.

That's about the only thing that keeps me away from using Linux in a day-to-day perspective. That up-front-cost and investment in time.

Yes, I know it will get a bit better (but not completely, OSS community moves fast). Yes, I know that its somewhat interesting. Yes, I know that there are replacement apps for the windows stuff I use....

But I just can't afford the time investment of figuring out where to get linux equivalent of xxxx and how it compares and contrasts with the OTHER linux equivalent of xxxx.

I believe that being raped by purchase/upgrade costs from Microsoft is FAR cheaper for me than those efforts and the time associated with them.

Besides, Cygwin for basics gets me so close on windows gets me at least to the point that I can stay sane. 8-)

Even Cygwin moved to X.org ... there is practically no confusion now.

Will Apache run on Windows without using IIS?

If so, why use IIS?

You hear that Windows? You're junking up my Apache logs. Grr.

You know, you should really give a shot to cygwin then. grep, find and locate/updatedb are relevant to the current discussion and combined with sed, awk and many other traditional posix tools make for a wonderful work environment. Or almost.

Giving them a happy blue box that blinks and costs $50 trumps any ability to ssh into it and fix. . . .

And I'm not getting calls during the weekend when a power outage fries the hard drive and I have to rebuild the Linux partition.

I think you're trolling a wee bit here.

First, the ability to ssh into a machine and fix things is not dependent upon choice of OS, because you can ssh into a Windoze box and fix it. If you want to see the user's desktop, use Desktop Sharing or whatever it's called on XP, with rdesktop (Free Linux client), or try VNC.

Second, it's silly to pretend Linux is more vulnerable to filesystem corruption than 'Doze. If it's a machine with unreliable power (or unreliable users), then use a journalling filesystem.

You're in the wrong place if you think you're going to convince anyone that Linux is truly more difficult or costly to support than 'Doze, especially now, when the true cost of its piss-poor security model is finally becoming apparent even to non-technical end users.

This person is really asking is, "How do I circumvent the unreasonable policies of the unwashed Microsoft conscripts that have taken over all of the Intel hardware?" He further pleads, "I want to be liberated. But I must be careful. If I outright revolt, if I install OpenBSD, they will send to a re-education camp." Which is located at the Unemployment Centre. "I could sneek in Cygwin, remain below the radar, boost my productivity, get promoted, and finally TAKE OVER THE WHOLE OF IT!BWAAAHA HA HA HA!

Sorry, got lost in the moment.

An operating system allocates resources (memory, processor time, et cetera) that are requested by applications. In OS X, the kernel is mach you may be interested in how it works.

Anyway, Cygwin is not an OS, its a set of development tools according to the authors. While it is a neat trick that win can be made to act like *nix.

BTW, my favorite NT thing... win2k claims to be built on "nt technology" which is very funny since "nt" means "new technology". I'll let you spell it out.

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

Has anyone tried running Yellow Dog Linux on a PowerBook?

I would be interested in hearing the performance and ease of use. I am particularly interested in the performance of the PowerPC chip and the integration of the hardware with the OS. In fact I would be interested in purchasing a Mac and wiping the OSX to run native Linux - can someone enlighten me on OSX; is it like running Cygwin on a PC?

The main reason towards my shift on the MAC hardware is the PowerPC chip, the keyboard lights discussed recently, Titanium/Magnesium Frame & shell, FireWire 800, the list goes on. What does other Slashdoters recommend on running Linux on a PowerPC architecture?

Cygwin really helps make using Windows a tolerable experience.

I recommend changing the shell from explorer.exe to cygwin.bat, then it doesn't even seem much like Windows anymore!

Not to be a Nitpick, but can I download the KDE environment for Win32, so I can compile KMail on my workmachine running Windows XP?

Yes, you can.

It requires the (questionably licensed) cygwin DLL,

What's questionable about it? It's GPL with a linking exception for other OSI-approved licenses, so for example you can port a BSD-licensed program to Cygwin without it being 'infected'. If you want to use it in non-OSS projects you can buy a commercial license. Please explain, with examples, why this is a problem.

so it essentially runs under the cygwin runtime, causing it to be brittle and slow slow slow.

Brittle? Solider than many native Windows apps.
Slow? I've never had any speed problems; Windows plus Cygwin runs faster for me than FreeBSD's Linux compatibility mode, for example.

Please either support your arguments or take your trolling somewhere else.

It doesn't have a remotely useable shell

It doesn't have one installed by default, you mean. Try Cygwin. I remotely log in to my Windows XP machine on a regular basis via Cygwin's SSH; in fact, even when I'm at it I connect to itself through PuTTY, since I like its terminal features much more than WinXP's normal DOS emulator.

If you really want, though, you could log in via Remote Desktop Connection and open a DOS window that way. Believe it or not, it's quite usable even over a 56k modem.

1. 4NT - I am old enough to use the command line.
2. Visual Slickedit - my editor of choice. I started out with version 4 and I just sent off the money for the upgrade to version 9 yesterday.
3. Subversion - 'cause VCS is a must. The place where I work may not use it but I will.
4. Tortoise SVN - to make my life with a VCS even more easy.
5. Cygwin - mostly for GCC.
6. Linkstash - I think this is a much better way to manage bookmarks
7. Winzip - the latest version. And yes, I've paid for it.
8. Object Desktop - I've gotten addicted to Object Bar and Object Edit. No, I'm not into skinning...
9. OE-QuoteFix - makes Outlook Express a bearable newsreader.
10. ev41 - a free HP-41 emulation for when I need a real calculator. There is a Pocket PC version too.

VirtuaWin - Virtual desktop manager

PuTTY - SSH client

WinSCP - GUI-based SSH file copier

Mozilla - The Web browser

CygWin - UNIX-like command line tools and environment

FuhQuake - QuakeWorld client with advanced rendering.

Vim - text editor extraordinaire

VoodooLights - screen saver (alas, no longer supported or available)

TweakUI - Allows tweaking of various Windows UI details

DeliPlayer 2 - music player, including support for "MOD" formats

Schwab

I install these programs first on new Windows machines.

• firefox
• cygwin (including emacs, ncftp, wget, openssh, grep, sed, and other favorites)
• putty
• ntfilemon/ntregmon
• Java2 SDK
• winamp
• VideoLAN Client
• wget
• WinPT/gpg
• Filzip

VNC, Emacs for Windows, VMWare, CDEx, Vorbis Tools, DaemonTools follow. I like Photoshop but as long as it's crippled (currency watermarks) and activated I'll never buy another license for it.

1. Firefox
2. The Adblock extension for Mozilla/Firefox
3. mplayer
4. Flash and Java plugins for the browers

Windows:

1. Putty
2. Firefox
3. Mozilla
4. The Adblock extension for Mozilla/Firefox
5. Spybot S&D
6. Flash/Java/Acroread plugins for the browsers
7. WinSCP
8. Cygwin (including XFree86 and Windowmaker)
9. OpenOffice

The only Windows I use is Windows XP Professional as a unix admin in a corporation, so some items may be notably absent. My entire Windows list is software that can be used royalty-free for commercial use )with an obvious emphasis on Free Software).

For example, I use XFree86 shipped with Cygwin for my X server, WinSCP for secure file transfer, Spybot S&D (and not AdAware, which is another excellent product, but would require a licensing fee be paid).

I don't use Winzip at all, since that functionality is built into the explorer interface in Windows XP Professional (don't know about the others), and is also available through Cygwin.

On the occasion I'm visiting a friend who runs Windows on a personal desktop, I also recommend Zinf, the audio player, since it's free software and just plays the music without any corporate spyware tie-ins, eg., contacting a server based on mp3 header fields as WMP and Winamp have started doing.

and for Linux - postfix, squirrelmail, screen, apache, mysql, squid, php, courier-imap, rsync, cvs - in no particular order

posted this list at my blog too - First Ten Programs

1. PuTTY (secure client)
2. Cygwin (Linux emulation layer)
3. Gaim (instant messaging)
4. Scite (editor)
5. Firefox (browser)
6. TortoiseCVS (version control)
7. Spybot S&D (malware detector)
   
8. Privoxy (filtering web proxy)
9. Gimp (graphics)
   
10. CacheSentry (to fix IE's cache, in case I use it)

1. Cygwin - get the POSIX environment on!
2. PuTTY - the only terminal I've found that handles colors and stuff right.
3. TightVNC - get to some other computer
4. OO.o
5. vim - I'm not even a VI guy, but it's fast and has nice hooks into explorer and I'm too lazy to deal with registering TextPad or whatever. JEdit's also nice, but way too slow for casual use... I usually go straight to emacs for that kind of editing.
6. Mozilla / Firefox / etc. - and the plugins:
   • Flash
   • Acrobat Reader
   • StumbleUpon toolbar - it's like having your own personalized fark (not that I read fark, but this is probably why)
7. Winamp - get the groove on
8. MPlayer - it handles just about all the codecs
9. MultiDesk - usable multiple desktops for Windows... like getting that 10% productivity improvement for having dual monitors without having to pay 100% more in displays. If only it had a visual pager...
10. Windows PowerToys - because every little option matters

More on Linux and MacOS X later, I guess...

Don't forget cygwin, so you can actually get some work done.

the Cygwin installer.

One of the first things I install on a windows machine is putty. Can't live without it...

Of course cygwin provides more of environment and the added benefit of remote Xwindows connections (without annoying cripple ware).

On the other hand, cvs isn't terrible - and you don't need to be doing OSS or huge # of devs to warrant its use. Cygwin allows you you run in windows, and there is also a windows version of the cvs server.

But look, if you are developing something windows based, and using MS products or IDE's, VSS is not out of the question...it plays well with other MS tools, so it might make the most sense.

Cygwin can do this already.

With Cygwin, you aren't running a full blown Linux environment. Here is the Cygwin FAQ. I can't read the article (Slashdotted), but judging from the snippet here, it seems like coLinux will run an actual Linux image, which would be a big difference.

But the truth is the only kind of software the Windows users really know or care about writing is worms and viruses -- and even then they only manage that with a lot of help from Microsoft. They're quite content to eat the shit they get fed, because they know it would be too much like hard graft to try changing it.

You're a filthy troll, and your post demeans the hard work of many skilled programmers.

Fuck off back to your cave, and leave those of us alone who, despite being forced to live in darkness, still want to light a candle of freedom there.

GCC has been ported to Windows. If you just want a minimalistic setup, try MinGW (Minimalist GNU For Windows). This just installs things like GCC and 'make' and a few GCC-related tools. If you want GCC with an entire unix-like environment running under Windows where you can do builds that rely a lot on unix-tools, and build programs that assume a unix-environment, I suggest you install Cygwin.

As for the Windows libraries, I'm not sure if the EULA that applies to Visual studio that prevents you from writing GPL'd code also applies to using the Windows librasries with GCC-based compilers as well.

>What are the Windows people missing out on?

For those who love the command line: exactly nothing. Services for Unix is free and supported by the OS vendor, and if you don't like it there's always UnixUtils, 4NT and Cygwin.

Yes... or at least "kinda", not sure. I only used it once, and only to try out Freeciv, so I have no idea how well it works. But they do have screenshots of Windowmaker and and a few other window managers.

And then there're native shell replacements like Litestep, among others.

I can run multiuser on Windows anytime. I just install Cygwin, and ssh across to it. I ssh to it, point DISPLAY at my Linux box and fire up a window manager under Cygwin.

scientists who use windows buy expensive programming environments and sophisticated scientific software, scientists who use macs have compilers for several languages within the system

Mac OS X comes with GCC. You can get GCC for Windows, or you can get GCC plus a UNIX source compatibility layer for Windows.

This is the problem with Windows. There's hardly any command line mail clients. Pine used to be one, but now it's switched to a standard GUI-like app which won't run in the cmd.exe window. The only choices I can think of currently is to use Mutt, or curses-Pine through Cygwin. I've also found an IBM lotus client, but it requires registration. With all the email viruses on Windows, one would think that someone would create a nice, native text client.

This is the problem with Windows. There's hardly any command line mail clients. Pine used to be one, but now it's switched to a standard GUI-like app which won't run in the cmd.exe window. The only choices I can think of currently is to use Mutt, or curses-Pine through Cygwin. I've also found an IBM lotus client, but it requires registration. With all the email viruses on Windows, one would think that someone would create a nice, native text client.

mutt runs under cygwin on Windows XP just fine. And yes, it has full access to my system :P Of course, I don't do anything stupid to compromise my box while reading mail in mutt.

Cygwin is really great! It is free to use unless you want to include it in a non-GPL app. If you do, then it is very, very expensive.