Installing cygwin on your personal machine

As I have mentioned in class, the easiest way to get a UNIX-like environment on a machine running a Windows OS is to install cygwin.  You can read more about cygwin at wikipedia:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin

You may choose to download cygwin from it's official website:

• http://www.cygwin.com/

HOWEVER, my experience has been that some of those mirrors don't work particularly well.  When I installed it from the cygwin website over the summer, it took three aborted installs before I got it to work.

INSTEAD, you may choose to follow the directions put up by Dr. O'Kane

• http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/cygwin/install-notes.html

Unless he has made significant changes of which I am not aware, I have had very little problem getting cygwin to install by following his instructions.  However, a few notes that I would make:

• Some of his screen shots will look different depending on your version of XP/Vista (my unzip feature is different than his).  Just pay attention and it will make sense.
• If you follow the step where he has you change from "default" to "install" you will end up installing EVERY cygwin package available.  This makes life easier, but it means that the installation will take up a TON of room on your machine (he says 2.5 GB).  If you have the room, you may choose to do this.  If not, leave the selection to default, but then browse the packages to mark things you might want/need that aren't part of the default install.  In particular, you will want to add in xemacs or pine (what you need to install to get pico) so you have a text editor.
• If you do the full install, it WILL take close to an hour.  When I just did it, it looked like it "hung" right at the end with 99% installed, but when I paid attention I noticed the package names were changing.
• If you DON'T do the full install, I wouldn't delete any of the set up files until you have confirmed everything works.
• This install will place four icons on your desktop.  You probably only need the cygwin icon and can remove the others.
• You will need to have java already on your computer and then perform ONE MORE configuration step...
  • At a command prompt in your home directory (where you are when you first start cygwin) you will need to edit your .bash_profile (note the period in front of that).  Use xemacs or pico or vi or whatever.
  • Down in this file you will see a comment about adding PATH variable information.  After these comments, add the following lines of code:

    PATH="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\bin:${PATH}"
    INCLUDE="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\include:${INCLUDE}"
    LIB="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\lib:${LIB}"

    Where you replace the path in red with whatever path is correct for your computer and whatever version of Java is on your computer.

After all of that, you should be set up to edit, compile, and execute Java code from the command prompt in cygwin.

See me if you need more assistance.