Cygwin question

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

The short answer is "not really."  It's possible to just click on the 
"All" button to install every Cygwin package.  If you want a nice 
installer, that's as good as it gets.  If you want not such a nice 
install, you can manually install packages once the base system is 
installed.  This isn't recommended or really supported.  You'll need to 
make sure that bash, coreutils, tar and bzip2 are working.  All are part 
of the base system which is installed if you just go with the defaults 
and don't change anything.  It would also help to install an ftp client 
such as ncftp, but the Windows ftp client would work.  Go to a Cygwin 
mirror such as ftp.osuosl.org and download the packages you want to 
install.  Make a temp directory and extract the archives within bash.  
Manually move the files into the correct places, such as moving 
mypkg/usr/share/doc to your c:\cygwin\usr\share\doc and mypkg/etc to 
c:\cygwin\etc.  Don't move files from the usr/bin directory to 
cygwin\usr\bin because it won't work.  Instead, just dump them into 
\cygwin\bin.  You should have a postinstall and possibly other scripts 
to run.  Make sure they're executable (they should be) and run them 
after everything is manually in place.  If you're lucky, it will 
actually work.  If not, just click on All from the installer and install 
everything, allowing for about 2 GB of disk space.

Note that all of the above is for Cygwin 1.5.  I haven't used 1.7.  You 
should try it and see if it's better.  Note that 1.7 is still in testing 
and won't run on anything less than XP or 2000.  I would like to know if 
1.7 is any better.  Get http://cygwin.com/setup1.7.exe or setup-1.7.exe 
instead of the usual setup.exe.

Tom Masterson wrote:
> Does anyone know of an accessible way to install packages under cygwin?