Cygwin 1.7 Released

jensend writes "The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility."

Comments

Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Windows has had a POSIX layer of its own for awhile now, as "Services for Unix".

On the lighter-weight end, mingw can give you the basics, and they usually run much faster (even bash!) than Cygwin did. Maybe Cygwin is better now, it's just that I don't really see what it has over, well, any other way of running POSIX apps on Windows.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[SharpFang]

A couple thousands of binaries of Linux apps installable with a couple of clicks, integrating with the system and each other?

How long, since you decide you want to, until you can start writing, compiling and running GCC, perl, python and such apps, on "Services for Unix"? On Cygwin it's about 20 minutes from which 15 you spend drinking coffee watching the progress bars.

Do we finally have unicode support?

[Dwedit]

For a while, I've been using a modified version of Cygwin in order to get proper UTF-8 support. Does the new version finally integrate a similar feature?

I was never really impressed

[bsDaemon]

Let's be honest -- whether Linux or BSD is ready for the desktop, ready for the laptop is something slightly lacking, and I mostly have laptops these days. I couldn't take it anymore with Linux or BSD on my laptop, so I bought Vista. Of course, I can't live without a command line, because that's what I'm used to. I remembered having used Cygwin years ago, back in the Win95 days, and so I tried to give it ago.

No dice -- it doesn't really integrate with the rest of the system very well, I find. Maybe I'm just not doing it right, but whatever. Then I gave up and grabbed SFU off of Microsoft's website. It was OK, but not really stellar. It's more for running batch jobs and giving something to code against than for interactive use, same as Cygwin I guess.

Eventually I got so pissed sick of it all that I just bought a MacBook Pro so that I could have a Unix-ish environment without having to worry about power management or weird wifi issues that I'd had with Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Slackware, ZenWalk, Mint, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PC-BSD on the Toshiba hardware.

So, I guess my question is -- is Cygwin meant for interactive use, or just to give the POSIX API and build environment so you can see whether or not your code will compile against a Unix machine? Because it seems like they've been putting an awful lot of effort into this for a very long time for it to suck so bad if its meant to be an interactive method of accessing a Windows machine by Unix commands.

Re:I was never really impressed

[plasticsquirrel]

Cygwin isn't meant to give you all the Linux or Windows system features, just provide a full-featured POSIX emulation layer (at its core, just one DLL), and programs compiled for that. You may still need to use Windows utilities to access Windows-specific features that have no POSIX implementation. However, the important thing is that it basically gives Unix developers a common platform, so anything developed for general Unix systems will compile on Cygwin's POSIX emulation layer.

Since Cygwin basically throws you into a command shell, it really does require an understanding of the fundamentals of Unix/Linux systems and how to work effectively in a shell. For example, I doubt many users of Slackware or NetBSD would have any substantial complaints about Cygwin. As someone who used Cygwin for years in a corporate environment where I could not use Linux, it was a godsend. I could spend my whole day working in Cygwin without having to mess with Windows development environments. Being able to throw together a bash script that uses grep, sed, awk, etc. is so nice for a stranded Linux user. However, many people do not learn the basic utilities anymore, even basic things such as customizing a login shell.

If there is a weak point in the Cygwin interactive experience, in my opinion it comes from the fact that the default Windows terminal program is used, which is slow and generally terrible compared to the modern Linux terminal apps. Maybe someday there will be a fast and full-featured replacement. But as it is, the Windows terminal is basically sluggish early 90's cruft that just isn't up to the task. Not a fault of Cygwin, but still a problem when running any such programs on Windows.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[RDaneel2]

No, SFU/SUA is not the same as Cygwin... it is an implementation of a POSIX(?) userland that sits directly on top of the NT kernel. Also unlike Cygwin, it does not rely on the Win32 subsystem. It comes with numerous GNU, System V, and BSD utilities. One of its design goals is to be "source compatible", so that in general only a recompile of Unix apps is required. And I, like many others, would like to know when the release of all the actual tools for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 version of SUA will show up... it has now been over 2 months since general release of Windows 7. Sigh.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[daveime]

For *nix users, however, the reverse is usually true.

Making the half-assed GUI so lousy that people will actually prefer a command line interface is not the right way to go about doing things

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[barrkel]

Copy and paste: getclip and putclip. But I usually abbreviate them to p and c with a couple of wrappers.

I find Cygwin integrates really well with the rest of Windows, particularly when you mount the right drives in directories off the root, so that you have /c/ etc., but still have access to Win32 apps. I practically live in my bash/rxvt shell.