Cygwin Come to Rescue Linux Fans on Windows

Posted on Aug 19, 2013 in Software

Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives.

  1. It is suggested that you use 32 bit Cygwin as it has a better package support.

  2. Some tools (e.g., terminator) are not included in the regular release of Cygwin, but can be installed using Cygwin Ports.

  3. Configuration files for many applications (e.g., bash and Vim) in Linux can be migrated to Cygwin directly and work out of the box.

  4. You might get an error about "... unexpected token ..." if you edit your bash script in Windows and try to run it under Cygwin. You can fix the problem by convert DOS text file format to Unix/Linux text file format using the command dos2unix. You can do the opposite using the command unix2dos.

  5. If you are running Cygwin behind a (corpate) firewall, you have to choose "use http proxy" when you install packages.

  6. To install new packages, run the Cygwin installer again and select new packages that you want to install. Installed packages will be kept by default. There's a script apt-cyg witten by Stephen Jungels which gives users similar experience to apt-get and wajig in Debian/Ubuntu.

  7. You can use keychain to manager your SSH public key in Cygwin.

  8. Sometimes Cygwin fails to download and install new packages (even there is no problem with the network and proxy). Restalling it can often solve the problem in this situation.

  9. Use gawk instead if awk does not work in Cygwin.

  10. It is best to put your configurations files in the $HOME/archives. And link to the home directory in Cygwin. Do not put data directly in Cygwin, because it makes things not portable.

  11. The rename utility on Cygwin/MobaXterm has very limited functionality. It mimics the rename command on older version (2.6) of Linux. The new version of rename (on latest version of Linux) is not compatible with the older version one (on Cygwin/MobaXterm).

  12. By default, the PATH environment variable in Cygwin contains some Windows executable paths before Cygwin executable paths. This shelter some Linux commands from being used directly. For example, Windows has a find command which might shelter the Linux find command. If this is case, you can either use the full path to the Linux find command, or you can put it into a Cygwin executable path before Windows executable paths. Sometimes, this causes seriously problems. For example, if you install R and its executables into the PATH environemtn variable, its executables shelter Cygwin's and make it not work well. It is suggested that you manually prepend $HOME/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, etc. into $PATH in the .bashrc file in Cygwin.

  1. make, cmake

python-dateutil (via Cygwin Ports), python-pip (manually)

pip install python-dateutil

python-setuptools (contains easy_install)

However, notice that if you have Python (e.g., Anaconda Python) installed on Windows, it might confuse yourself about which one you are using ... Avoid installing Python on Windows if you have it installed in Cygwin or at least be careful about the path ...

it seems to me that the best way to install Python packages on Cygwin is to use Python directly, 

python setup.py --install package_name

Packages that Fail to Work

  1. FuzzyWuzzy

  2. NLTK

  3. NumPy

  1. git

  2. git-completion (required for Git to auto complete in Cygwin)

Editor

  1. Vim

Text Manipulation Tools

  1. colordiff

Available Tools Installed by Default

  1. cd, ls, cp, mv, chmod, chown, ln

  2. du, df

  3. grep, sed, awk

Availabe Tools not Installed by Default

  1. terminator (available via Cygwin Ports)

  2. shutdown, halt, reboot (availabe via the shutdown package)

  3. openssh-client, scp, rsync, keychain (keyring for ssh)

  4. wget (better supported in 32 bit version of Cygwin until 1.7.35), curl, unison, w3m

  5. gcc, git

  6. screen (no help doc available, which is odd)

  7. Vim

  8. pdftk (only available on 32 bit as of Mar 6, 2015)

  9. tmux

  10. convert (in the ImageMagic package)

  11. rename (available via the util-linux package, not as powerful as rename in linux but OK for simple batch rename)

  12. clear (available via the ncurses package)

  13. TexMacs

  14. Texlive

  15. dos2unix, unix2dos

Missing Tools

  1. openssh-server

  2. dvipng

  3. netstat (use X-NetStat as an alternative)

  4. pandoc, wkhtmltopdf, pdfgrep

Linux Windows virtualization software Cygwin