A Conversation for Unix

Cygwin

Post 1

HappyDude

http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/

any comments on this ?


Cygwin

Post 2

Caveman, Evil Unix Sysadmin, betting shop operative, and SuDoku addict (Its an odd mix, but someone has to do it)

Breaking 16 months of silence in here, I'll answer.

I happen to be rsync'ing it at the moment from mirrors.xmission.com and wow, it's a biggie. All of 1.3Gb. Might take a while. I'll hopefully have it all down and sorted onto a couple of CD's to take into work by morning.

The greatest benefit to me as a unix hacker stuck in a windows world is that if you want to knock up ten lines of C to test something on a windows system, you can either:

A) Spend hours twiddling billions of options in MS Visual C++ and generate a whole project as a result

or

B) Run vi, bash in ten lines of code, gcc -o foo.exe foo.c and have the answer before the kettle has finished boiling.

Then of course, there's the ability to type in crypic one-liner shells and have them work, allowing you to temporarily block out the horror that is working on a fundamentally brain-damaged filesystem. Whaddaya mean I can't have a file called "-rf *"

I mean, just who invents a function interface that takes a 64-bit integer, and passes it to a function by splitting it into two parts and passing the low 32 bits by value, and the high 32 bits by reference?? This despite the fact that MSVC can handle INT64's itself, and even if it couldn't, ANY language should be able to deal with a pointer to a 64-bit object (Look up the Win32 API for SetFilePointer if you don't beleive me)

Finally, if I can resist ranting for a moment, the X server is useful, although I usually use Xvnc. The old version I have (which is why I am rsync'ing now) has only twm as a window manager which is so zarking awful I run a window manager from a remote system; typically fvwm95-2, sawfish, or the kde window manager, although at one stage I ran the DECWindows window manager from the MicroVAX II just to see what would happen, and it worked. Fonts were a bit off though, but then DEC always had strange ideas about what fonts were standard for X11.

Anyhow, it's late, and I'll be getting up early to burn the freshly rsync'd cygwin stuff to CD's in the morning, so time to..

/sbin/ifconfig brain0 down


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