Cygwin is a unix emulation environment for Windows. If you must use a Windows machine to write code then Cygwin will help.

http://www.cygwin.com/

After installing Cygwin, you'll want to set up logins and passwords. You can use mkpasswd and mkgroup for this purpose, and take a look at the -d flag if you're running in a Windows domain.

See also http://xfree86.cygwin.com/ if you're planning on running X with Cygwin. You can run X in either single-window mode (with X inside one big Windows window) or multi-window mode where there is no X root window and X windows "float" along with Windows windows.

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat is a good way to start X. I hacked it to run rxvt instead of xterm - it seems to be more consistent with the terminals that I use on unix machines. There appear to be two solutions to cutting and pasting back and forth - download xwinclip and run it in startxwin.bat or add the -clipboard command-line parameter to X. I've used the command-line xwinclip but not the X feature.

rxvt can run both as a Windows program and as an X program, depending on where you run it from. You can make an icon for it by dragging the executable c:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe onto the little tray next to the Start menu. A useful set of properties for the "Target" field is

C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe --loginShell -bg black -fg white -sl 1000 -e /bin/bash --login

this opens a white-on-black bash login shell.

-- TobyCabot - 27 Jan 2003 - 07 Apr 2003