CyGWin

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Tue Feb 18, 2003 5:32 am

can i talk about cygwin in here?
i couldn't figure out if it comes under the heading of red hat or not.

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Tue Feb 18, 2003 5:53 am

Heh heh, sure. Let's try it and see how it goes. I do have some experience with cygwin and have used to in conjunction with my X-Terminal server instructions on a real Linux system.

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Tue Feb 18, 2003 9:07 am

yeah?

I tried it on my work machine you see. after a quick minute i decided i couldn't really be arsed with X and i reinstalled it a week later with no x. basically i like its ability to do all those little things that cmd cannot do, or cannot do well. earlier i just used it to split a 14.5M file up and slap it on 11 floppy disks for example, which is all bollocks on windows and needs 3rd party adware and so on. also, i am confident that since i did that with split, i can concatenate it all together at home fine on the real linux system.

and i hope to find a lot more little uses for cygwin. for instance i suppose i can now use ncftp instead of the crappy ftp client that comes with DOS. also, i now have wget. i can get used to vim while i am at work too (as you know, i've been using emacs up to this point - i remembered why the other day too, my laptop has a nonfunctional 'Esc' key, a deciding factor in which editor to choose!)

some of the cygwin stuff annoys me though. 'ls' for instance seems to be a rehash of the output of 'dir' which really sucks. no colour coding or anything. cygwin in a lot of ways reminds me of freeDOS in fact. it takes DOS a lot further than microsoft ever did but it still has the limitations of DOS.

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Tue Feb 18, 2003 5:36 pm

Calum wrote:some of the cygwin stuff annoys me though. 'ls' for instance seems to be a rehash of the output of 'dir' which really sucks. no colour coding or anything. cygwin in a lot of ways reminds me of freeDOS in fact. it takes DOS a lot further than Micro$oft ever did but it still has the limitations of DOS.

Huh? It works for me. Are you running in a bash shell? Also, in order to get color you either need to alias ls like what is the default on most Linux distros or specify it on the command line with the "--color" param. To alias it just type this on the command line or add it to your bash profile/rc:

alias ls='ls --color'

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Wed Feb 19, 2003 2:45 am

hey thanks! i didn't know that!
top cool!

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Fri May 23, 2003 3:28 am

i just wanted to say that i managed in some way to install a copy of gygwin with no text editor! not even ed or vi. I don't appear to have installed less or more either! Am having to use cat to read and write files! works great unless you need to actually delete something in an existing file or insert something in the middle of a file!

Copperhead · Post by **Copperhead** » Fri May 23, 2003 10:57 pm

Just launch the installation file again, and you will be able to add/remove packages. When launching the file, it looks like it is going to reinstall Cygwin in its entirety, but it allows you to update packages that you forgot/missed.

byrdman · Post by **byrdman** » Wed May 28, 2003 4:17 pm

I think Cygwin is great! I was running a webserver from my laptop! Not sure how many times I tried to get by with having only linux on my laptop, but it came down to all the windows admin apps I needed. And I was too cheap to buy VMware...
Maybe there should be a Cygwin thread?

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Thu May 29, 2003 1:43 am

this is it!
not too many people use cygwin who post here so it probably doesn't warrant an area all of its own.

I tried to install cygwin in windows millenium the other day, it installs fine but it won't run. not a huge deal, i only really use slack on that computer anyway (i just have windows installed in case i need it in a hurry for some winrubbish my university requires me to have).

cygwin is very good as an idea though, and it's good to see cygnus still in the running amongst all the *ix free systems.

byrdman · Post by **byrdman** » Thu May 29, 2003 7:46 am

Sorry
I was just expressing my like of being able to use Cygwin and it powerful *nix commands on a windoze machine. Perl for example!
I guess I forgot to put my sarcastic emoticon!
Just trying to move to a open-sourced, open-minded world!!
I'll shut up now.

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Thu May 29, 2003 8:30 am

Huh? Why would you want to shut up? Your suggestion was a good one. It's not really a Linux distribution though since there is no Linux kernel included with it. There is nothing wrong with starting threads on the subject in "Other Distributions" and if it becomes a popular topic I could add another forum specifically for Cygwin.

And Calum, you actually use WinME?!? I think you are the only person I know who does. Eeewwwwww!!

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Thu May 29, 2003 9:44 am

well gee whiz byrdman, i really don't know what you took offence to in my post, but i think you're going to have to take what i say with a pinch of salt. that wasn't in any way offensive or angry or whatever you might have thought i was being compared with how i sometimes am.

voidmain, i wouldn't say i use it per se, i just happen to have a windows on my computer and since winME and win3.11 are the ones i legally own i just use winME. I will probably one day change to win2000 but i am not in a great hurry to do that because a) i tend to boot into windows about once every couple of months if that and b) my copy of win2000 is not legal

still, no way am i going to pay for it now i have got at least 11 linuces and 2 copies of FreeBSD!

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Thu May 29, 2003 9:54 am

I certainly wouldn't want you to "upgrade" as you know what my suggestion would be (getting rid of anything that starts with M$). :)