Thursday, February 03 2005 @ 08:53 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
Let's say you are in a situation where you are FORCED to use a Windows machine. Relax, this is a HYPOTHETICAL situation people. :) Now, let's say you are willing to do ANYTHING to bring back your familiar GNU/Linux desktop environment. Well, the LinuxJournal gives us a tutorial on how to use a piece of software called Cygwin to accomplish this very goal.
I recently found myself working at a company that uses Windows as the desktop environment. I was used to Linux, however, and wanted to have that on my desktop instead. Should you find yourself, for one reason or another, working in a Windows desktop environment but want to use Linux, Cygwin offers the opportunity to do so.
Cygwin is a dynamic link library (DLL) that acts as a Linux API emulation layer. Included with the Cygwin suite are most of the common Linux command-line tools and quite a few graphical applications, giving you the look and feel of a Linux machine on top of your MS Windows box. Cygwin provides substantial Linux functionality on all non-beta, non-Release Candidate, x86, 32-bit versions of Windows, starting with Windows95. The only exception is Windows CE.
Cygwin does not convert your Windows machine into a UNIX-compatible one, however. Cygwin does not enable your computer to understand UNIX signals, pseudo-terminals (PTYs) and such; it only provides mappings of UNIX actions to the Windows platform. It is not a way to make native Linux applications run on Windows. If you want an application to run on your Windows workstation, and it is not yet a part of the Cygwin suite, you will have to compile the source. If the application is a graphical one, another solution is to run the application remotely by using X functionality. We discuss the set up for remote display later in this article.
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Cygwin: Changing the Face of Windows
Authored by: Epor on Saturday, February 05 2005 @ 06:00 AM EST
Yeah, with Cygwin one get two OS's instead of one. X works quite all right. Usually my only headaches are deciding how to launch daemons, the Win-native version or Cygwin.
However if there wasn't anything such Cygwin I would certainly not need a Windows license :-)
PS. I have to admit that I find Windows 2000-style GUI superior to any X wm desktop. Not strange since one is incorporated into the OS. Or could it be that I never manage to configure the fonst, leaving me with ugly default stuff.
