For me, unix tools are a tremendous addition to the MS Windows system, whether from cygwin or elsewhere. It is a fine thing to have the bash shell running in a windows console. I rarely use windows, only have one machine running win95, and having a real shell makes the occasional necessity bearable.

Are you using Cygwin/XFree86 or just the console tools?

I've used the console stuff and it is definitely a breath of fresh air to have real tools available on Windows. I haven't tried the XFree port yet but I'd like to hear what experiences others have had. Our workstations group is looking for a replacement for Reflections X.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

I haven't tried the XFree port yet but I'd like to hear what experiences others have had.

It works. X11 forwarding works, so you can ssh into a *nix box and pull up GUI apps and display them on your Windows system. However, last time I tried it (which admittedly has been some months, so it may have improved) it was not as smooth as could be wanted, certainly not as smooth as a real *nix system. Among other things, installation was mildly a pain (more than for the console cygwin stuff), and rootless mode wasn't supported (so, you get one big cygwin/xfree window, with your X11 windows inside of it as if it were an MDI app). The wm that came with was twm, which is a tad bit on the minimalist side for my tastes. Presumably you could compile and install a different one. And stability left something to be desired -- I had X11 hang or crash much more frequently than under *nix. (I don't believe this was just the OS's instability coming through, as it seemed worse than that. The instability *may* have partly been what apps I was running, however, notably freeciv, the Windows port of which is not as well-maintained as could be wished.)

However, as noted, this was some months ago, and things may be much better now. I personally have getting a more up-to-date version on my todo list, and I don't think it would be a waste of your time to try out the latest and greatest. The version I tried months ago basically worked, so the current version may be quite good. Also, rootless mode support may have been checked in by the OS X people and may have found its way over into cygwin, though I'm guessing.

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$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
[download]

Rootless mode is in fact supported, though it requires some command line options which must be added to the startup script by hand. I believe that they do not fully encourage rootless mode yet (still in beta stage or something), but I've had no problems with it.

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If we didn't reinvent the wheel, we wouldn't have rollerblades.

The wm that came with was twm, which is a tad bit on the minimalist side for my tastes. Presumably you could compile and install a different one.

I believe you can do this more easily just by going back into the Setup program and choosing the desired wm. But it's been a while for me as well, so I could be misremembering.

There exist ports of almost all window managers (KDE, Gnome, ...) and all of them working good. KDE-2.x and KDE-3.x ports eat huge amount of resources, but KDE-1.x do not, and all other are quite good.

I like console-only mode though.

Courage, the Cowardly Dog

GNU Software for MS-Windows and MS-DOS, 2nd Edition (book with CD-ROM)

IMHO, it's worth $35 to support GNU and get a nice, easy-to-install, fully-packed distro of *nix tools for wintel. (Of course, you can look for the ftp mirrors and download it all at no cost, except the time you spend tracking down and fetching all those utility packages and docs).

I've worked with both the GNU kit (which I installed on my own windows boot partition at home) and Cygwin (which a co-worker had installed on some windows machines at the office). There are a few differences in their details, and it's probably just a matter of personal habits (or tendency to focus on certain details) that lead me to prefer GNU over Cygwin. YMMV.

I rarely find the need for them, but when I need to interact with unix systems or interchange stuff with unix systems, these satisfy every need I've found so far, and they are so much quicker than the Cygwin equivalents.

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Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Hooray!
Wanted!

I understand the point you are making, but I would like to take this opportunity to put in a good word for Codeweavers' Crossover Plugin/Office where development and testing are concerned. For a while now, Crossover Office has supported a Linux installation of Internet Explorer (not to mention Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Adobe Photoshop, Lotus Notes, and Quicken) which allows me to preview my web pages on my Linux system. The pages still look better in Mozilla (due to IE's interpretation of certain standards), but mod_perl suffers no performance loss. ;)

BazB & Monks! Just began to use cygwin, haven't figured out (yet) how to import code from PVCS into cygwin. Do PVCS or cygwin offer any standard routines to migrate code from one to another?

On the cygwin website, it says that you must rebuild native Linux applications from source if you want it to run on Windows.

This website states that PVCS is supported on Linux RH 9.0, and cygwin is based on Red Hat. So if you have access to the source code, perhaps you can try building it on cygwin, as you would other linux software packages.

Anne