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Bahahaha! Cygwin nullifies any benefit of using Linux. Most of those apps can compile on Windows. Don't forget, XFree86 has been running quite nicely through Cygwin for awhile now.

I know you can run it in Cygwin. I think you may also be able to run it in the Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX which they now give away for free.

I could use some wicked cool batch files.

Cygwin is your friend. For just one example, you can write a script that uses sed to extract information from the filenames of your mp3z and feed the results into id3ed to tack on an ID3 tag. Try doing that with a batch file.

Is it because I love Linux that much? No, it's because I can no longer live without Mutt.

You can run Mutt in Cygwin, and it's already included in its distribution. Didja know?

> Most of the users are on UNIX-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc). If you want to run an X Server on Windows 95, you're free to try one of the commercial implementations.


Or the free Cygwin/X.

If you want to run an X Server on Windows 95, you're free to try one of the commercial implementations.

Or use the one from Cygwin. I use it anytime I am forced to use Windows and want to use X11 apps or use my Linux box remotely. It works well.

No, from what I'm told, the main reason to fork is the attitude taken by some members of the XFree Core Team. As you said, its their code and they can do what they want but the forking has already happened:

Xouvert
Freedesktop
Cygwin X

Personally I don't see myself ever using XFree 4.4 and am looking forward to a complete release of fd.o. When that happens, I'll likely be moving everything I can off XFree but that's just me.

If you use cygwin, you can run wget (and many other nice unix-y tools) on Windows.

• SSH for Windows - works great for terminal access and secure file transfers.
• Teraterm - network device access via either telnet or serial port. There is an SSH add-on, but I prefer the "real" SSH client above.
• TightVNC - for your Windows boxes
• Superscan - great port scanner and all around TCP/IP utility
• Cygwin - for all your real *nix shell and utility needs

Jason

Why bother with crap when Cygwin has been available for ages.

Cygwin is a nice way to run XFree86 on Windows. Its not too difficult setup and its free, but X has its own quirks.
Anyway here's a user's guide..

Turns out, however, that the cygwin libraries are GPL'ed (not even LGPL'd, mind you) which means that you are prohibited from distributing non-GPL binaries.

Not true. The Cygwin distribution contains a number of non-GPL licenses: X11, Apache, LGPL, BSD, and others. Take a look at the Cygwin licensing terms:

In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs whose sources are distributed under a license that complies with the Open Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a without libcygwin.a itself causing the resulting program to be covered by the GNU GPL.

This means that you can port an Open Source(tm) application to cygwin, and distribute that executable as if it didn't include a copy of libcygwin.a linked into it. Note that this does not apply to the cygwin DLL itself. If you distribute a (possibly modified) version of the DLL you must adhere to the terms of the GPL, i.e. you must provide sources for the cygwin DLL.

1. Marimba Castanet (I know, I love to hate them, too) has a technology that provides auto-updates to files on a box, and can even be scripted to stop and restart the process. I have used this and while it is expensive, somewhat complex internally, and a bit slow, it does work, and is highly scalable to 10,000+ boxes quite easily.

2. Rsync (a very common open-source Samba project) will synchronize files across a network, sending only the file differences, handling file deletion if so requested, etc. Very, Very good product, widely used. Set this up with any *nix (Linux, Solaris, etc.). Or, for Windows, configure Cygwin to run cron as a service, and have a rsync run as a crontab entry.

If you need to reboot, have the synchronizer write a "DoRebootNow.txt" file with the box's name in it. The service watches the file and looks for its own box name, and if found, does a reboot and does a cgi post to a cgi that removes the boxname from that file.

Cumbersome in parts, either of these systems can work for you very reliably and effectively. I would estimate both jobs at between 1 and 2 weeks of labor, including writing the scripting or learning about Castanet. That depends of course on testing requirements, method of deployment to clients, etc. Some large installations could take a person-month just to install all the clients on the boxes!

Also, I've heard of SMS, but I don't know much about it. Sorry...

-- KevinJRice

In the case of an assumed identity, colloquially referred to as 'identity theft' this would probably legally be fraud if their was a crime.

What was your point again? That imprecision is permissible when discussing legal matters?.
I suspect that YANALATEYHSMBSI .

glibc from Cygwin are ultimately from GNU

Wrong. There is no glibc in Cygwin. The C library that's used is Red Hat's newlib C library. And libc is not "ultimately" from GNU. It's code heritage has origins of BSD, Cygnus, AT&T and a multitude of groups.

If there's a better way to do this, I don't know it, nor will it do me any good now.

Even though it may not do you any good, some of us can't use Windows without CygWin anymore, which takes care of the "all your unix commands are belong to us" syndrome quite nicely.

If you're using Linux and want to copy a lot of stuff from one place to another, you can use dd ('disk dump', designed for moving large files) and specify a blocksize of a few megs; this means that you will be moving data a few megs at a time, rather than a few K at a time - of course, this means that you have to use that much more memory. Also, I would imagine that Cygwin would allow you to use dd under Windows; another option is NTFS, where transfers from one directory to another on a single drive are nearly instantaneous. Of course, then you lose compatability; while FAT variants are understood by almost all OSes, you will have an unpleasant time trying to mount and use an NTFS volume from anything other than Windows. It's all about tradeoffs, but hopefully something here will help.

• Cygwin Linux emulation
• Mozilla
• Vim
• XFree86
• OpenOffice
• MinGW gcc
• Apache
• KDE

• Cygwin Linux emulation
• Mozilla
• Vim
• XFree86
• OpenOffice
• MinGW gcc
• Apache
• KDE

You'll need cygwin too, get it first if you don't have it already. (Make sure you install XFree86 packages from cygwin).

KDE3.2 for Windows should be available in a few months' time... :-)

[..] and without integration only users who have Lilypond themselves can contribute.

...that we're "more technical" because we have better toys. Having any modern Linux distribution is like having a honking great Lego (tm) collection (top toy, and it runs under MS-Windows as well). Having MS-Windows is like having Barbie dolls - sure they look pretty, and have all of these neat (and expensive) accessories, but after you've posed them in variations of six different ways, that's about it for imagination. For kids, it's time to rip the legs off and see what makes them go.

The shiny stuff in modern Linux distros (KDE, GNOME etc) is like modern Lego in that it is kind of pre-built. This takes some of the fun out of it but also saves doing some repetitive tasks (e.g. "assemble Bob the Builder model") and more accurately represents small objects.

PS, I very seldom "compile my own software" (although I've been doing a lot of it this last week for customers). When I do, I sing halleliujahs for the ability to do it, sadly absent in much MS-Windows software. But for 99% of what I do, eminently suitable "shrink-wrapped" versions exist, and most stuff is modular enough that BASH will glue it together if the existing stuff falls short.

Oh... that's right, you don't have BASH. Well, try the CygWin suite which includes it, and/or pull down a free PERL and have a go with that as a glue language.

I haven't had time to er, use usenet for ages. Google's interface is a pretty good newbie gateway to it.

Everyone knows about Cygwin which is a POSIX layer and distribution of GNU software for Windows. You can compile and run a lot of packages, including X applications.

Line
takes this a step further by running unmodified Linux binaries on Windows, but it's not currently an active project.

ISTR that one of the 32-bit DOS extenders (EMX perhaps?) had some wacky scheme to run the same binaries on Linux, Windows and OS/2.

You can already run many, many apps that were written for linux by using Cygwin. As long as the program is userspace, it can usually just be compiled for cygwin. This has the advantage of producing a windows binary and is pretty speedy. I've got KDE and all its applications running just great in cygwin on a Windows 2000 platform. They have XFree86 that you can use, but since I already owned a copy of Exceed, I can just use that.

When I wan't to use *nix tools under Windows I've always trusted Cygwin, but I can see how this project can provide a good alternative to Cygwin XFree86 as suggested in the roadmap. This could also provide an excellent solution for developers to test interoperability between Internet Explorer and Linux webservers - especially if they are limited to one computer. It could also be used to educate people on using Linux, it is a perfect match with Knoppix in this respect.

Wine developers could use this compare apps running natively and those running under wine side-by-side.

When I wan't to use *nix tools under Windows I've always trusted Cygwin, but I can see how this project can provide a good alternative to Cygwin XFree86 as suggested in the roadmap. This could also provide an excellent solution for developers to test interoperability between Internet Explorer and Linux webservers - especially if they are limited to one computer. It could also be used to educate people on using Linux, it is a perfect match with Knoppix in this respect.

Wine developers could use this compare apps running natively and those running under wine side-by-side.

OK, I've been thinking about making "the big leap" to a Linux distro for a while, and this Windows application compatibility looks really intriguing. Can someone give me an idea of how well it works, and any configuration / compatibility snafus it might have?

The only things, at this point, that would really prevent me from wanting to use Linux as my primary OS would be the ability to run Windows apps well (let's face it, I have a lot of apps on my system that work well already, and I don't want to have to lose access to them or have to reboot into Windows to use them), and the ability to play games / DirectX-based programs (I've heard WineX has this ability, any comments on how good it is / how easy it is to use / configure?).

I've recently been experimenting with KDE under Cygwin, which works surprisingly well except for a few glitches like not displaying JPEGs correctly (I've heard they fixed this in the latest version). Any comparisons?

It sounds like MS is going to try the free (as in beer) vs. free (as in beer and speech) approach. Pitting Windows+SFU against Linux might make Linux a little harder to sell since a lot of corporate environments already have Windows. I can hear the execs now, "So you're telling me that we can still run some Unix stuff that we might have wanted to run on Linux, but we don't have to install or buy any *nix?" Of course, you'll have Windows admins rejoicing and telling the suits, "Yes. This is what we want." But any decent admin is going to know that it might be useful, but there are alternatives.

Can be found from Interix. You can change the crappy KSH to Bash and get a nice build system up and going in no time. I normally use Cygwin but I'm going to give this a try, even if it isn't GPL'd.

There's no need for the security hole-ridden ssh to read your mail. Just use cygwin and mutt!

> > I wist[sic] windows would have the grep command =(
> Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 and the Win 98 Resource Kit has a similar command in findstr. A basic set
> of regular expressions are included like character classes, ranges, beginning and end of
> words and lines, and multiple matching.

Better yet (imho), just install Cygwin, which gives you a full unix environment with all the tools necessary to use Win32 without feeling the need to gut yourself. That includes grep, find, locate and similar tools.

Plus, if you're insane enough, you can use it to install X11 and run KDE 3.1 or GNOME 1.4 instead of explorer.exe. Well, except that they're not yet mature on this platform (KDE runs extremely slowly, while GNOME is both not up to date and a bit less stable than what you'd expect from GNOME).

--
-JC
coder, needs FT work, Long Island, NY
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main

I think a pretty strong case can be made for explorer over cmd as the default windows shell. CMD.exe is really nothing more than a command line interface to explorer. It implements only a narrow subset of explorers capabilities, relies on explorer much like any other called program for process control, filesystem access, etc. etc. etc.

As for WSH, forget it, same paradigm, different implementation.

Now if you want a real shell... this is about as close as you're going to come.

Firstly, cygwin is insecure in a multiuser environment. Secondly, it's fairly difficult to get all those languages installed and working in any reasonable amount of time in Windows (as opposed to Debian where you can apt-get install them all). And thirdly, there are nasty bugs and limitations. In reality, Windows is a second-class platform for using Free Unix programming tools.

when have you last time checked Cygwin? They host PostgreSQL binaries for years. Works fine, flawlessly and fast.

Got a demo disk of this with a magazine, I think Microsoft's aim is to push people away from UNIX! What a pile it is, barly usable (gcc wouldn't compile anything even remotly complex) There are much better uses for $99.

Keep your money and install cygwin you'll be 100 times happier, and a little bit "richer"

I even do my primary editing on my windoze box using emacs, and am in the process of writing python language equivalents to the most common unix command line utilities (already completed 'grep.py' - then want: make, diff, patch and other tools unavailable on the windows command line) as a learning process.

If the "learning process" ever becomes an extremely difficult "learning process" or you decide you've had enough, check out Cygwin -- it has everything you need on Windows.

You're aware of Cygwin which provides all the GNU tools, compilers, linkers, editors, etc, even the standard UNIX APIs, all ported to Windows? I understand that you want to learn, but there are other UNIX emulation projects out there, and they took person-decades to write. You're just one guy...

The Cygwin *nix-emulation layer for Windows does a pretty decent job of mapping NT file permissions for *nix programs run under it. Of course, it would probably be pretty difficult to read out the users and groups from the SAM database when Windows is not running, but for many it would probably be quite acceptable to run a program under Windows once which exports a few files with the necessary information (mapping from security identifiers to user/group names etc). This information should rarely change, so that shouldn't be a big problem.

The Cygwin *nix-emulation layer for Windows does a pretty decent job of mapping NT file permissions for *nix programs run under it. Of course, it would probably be pretty difficult to read out the users and groups from the SAM database when Windows is not running, but for many it would probably be quite acceptable to run a program under Windows once which exports a few files with the necessary information (mapping from security identifiers to user/group names etc). This information should rarely change, so that shouldn't be a big problem.

Linux fanboy: "When will the Longhorn fake-commandline-console look and behave like bash and therefore be ready for serious work?

Cygwin

You're welcome.

I have really no idea why it was modded as Funny. I had nothing but great experience with dd(1), especially the version from GNU Fileutils. If you are stuck with MS Windows and cannot use Knoppix then check out Cygwin. One of the great advantages of dd(1) is the ability to use good old Unix-style anonymous pipes, so with Netcat or SSH it can really do miracles with filesystems cloning across the network, be it LAN (with nc(1)) or the Internet (with ssh(1) as nc(1) sends data as unencrypted).

There are several sources for GNU compatible toolchains available out-of-the-box for Windows.

So, to ask your question more broadly, why should anybody run Linux?

(this is meant as sarcasm, folks....)

findstr is useful when i need to go to another machine. but i live by cygwin on my windows work machine. if you're the type of person who's looking for grep, it's definitely for you.
note that the cygwin installer is horrible. it will crash. it will stop working and make you have to re-select the million or so packages you've already chosen. but once it's done, you're golden.

I guess I should point out, since no one has yet for this article, that while we're waiting for MSH to come along, Cygwin has a bash shell (and a bunch of other shells too) and lets you navigate the filesystem like you would in Linux/UNIX... it's tasty.

You didn't specify OS, though I reckon it's probably an open source one. However, I'll post this anyway, in case it can help anyone:

Under Windows, you can add the driver for the "Apple Color LW 12/660 PS" printer, pointed at the FILE: port (i.e., it prints to a file). The resulting files are PostScript. You can then install GhostScript (either on its own or as part of Cygwin) and use the ps2pdf utility to convert it to PDF. It's not very featureful (e.g., it can't generate document indices or anything), but it looks sharp.

Also, ps2pdf.com apparently allows you to upload a .ps file and download a .pdf file without having to install GhostScript on your machine.

Good luck!

Perhaps it's my experience with having used Protext on the Amiga, but I never saw the point of an interactive spelling checker. I want to type a document up, get the spelling checked while I'm away doing something else, then come back and correct the misspelt words.

That was great for the days when spell checking was a process that took a long time. But now it can be done almost instantly for any reasonable length document (I have a 35kword document I'm working on with OO.org with a few non-dictionary words in it, and a spell check occurs as quickly as I can move my eyes from clicking the 'skip' button back to the box that displays the word that isn't in the dictionary). The idea of checking the spelling 'while you're away' is an idea that had its time ten years ago, it just isn't possible now. The check will be done before you can get out of your seat.

Windows must have equivalents for spell, sort, uniq and awk, right?

Yeah. They're right here.

it must have the basics, even on the minimal installation ..... surely?

Why do you want things that almost nobody will use in the minimal installation? That would be bloatware, and MS are accused of that enough of the time already.

It's fine that those of us who know enough to be able to use these tools have to go out of our way to get them. It's hardly a difficult task, and well worth the effort.

I haven't tested this, but does evolution work in Cygwin? Might be worth a try.

On the other hand, the file system is completely mapped under /cygdrive, there is access to services and the registry. I don't exactly call that being ignorant of Windows.

Personally, I'm more inclined when doing system/network management thingies to go off in the direction of Perl/Win32 which gives me more than CMD and better implemented than WSH or VBS.

And for the person who called the above FUD, read the journal entry. It lists a whole lot of reasons why Windows offers a better desktop experience than Linux and at the bottom has some suggestions on how to improve the Linux experience - although the journal entry is now over six months old.