Installation Hints and Tips for Cygwin

Cygwin is a unix environment that runs under Windows. Many Unix apps have been ported including X Windows.

Download and Install Cygwin here

Once the options/applications have been selected and the instalation is complete, launching Cygwin will run a terminal window such as this :-
A windows manager such as Xfce4 will provide a much better working environment.
1. A Cygwin version can be downloaded from here (Failing that, try here or here). Follow the instructions carefully. It will probably be necessary to revisit the Cygwin setup to add a couple of dependent packages such as glib2 and gtk2.
2. Edit your .bashrc file and set your path to find xfce4 by adding the following :-
```
    PATH=/opt/xfce4/bin:$PATH
    export PATH
```
3. Start xfce by running :-
```
    startxfce4
```
4. If Xfce4 faild to start with errors stating that dll's have not been found, you probably need to run the cygwin setup to add extra packages. To help identify which package you need to add, try using the Setup Package Search utility.
  
  Since I did not follow the instructions so well, I found the following...
```
Required Cygwin Component:
        Category = Libs, glib2: Low-level core library (For cygglib-2.0-0.dll and Others ?)
        Category = Libs, gtk2-x11: Multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. (For cyggdk-x11-2.0-0.dll and others ?)
        Category = Libs, libxml2 (For cygxml2-2.dll and Others ?)
```

Roger Hall
COMPUSPEC