Installing Cygwin/X
Cygwin tools are, in the words of the Cygwin development homepage, http://cygwin.com/, «ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows 95, 98, and NT. They function by using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API.» Cygwin allows the compilation of the X Window System source on Win32; several patches were made to the X Window System source to make it actually compile and run under Cygwin.
Cygwin has a nice setup program that downloads and installs the necessary Cygwin packages for you.
- Open the Cygwin, http://cygwin.com/ page in your web browser
- Click the «Install Cygwin Now» link in the upper-right hand corner of the page. This link downloads setup.exe from the primary Cygwin server; save setup.exe to the directory that you would like to store the downloaded packages in (e.g. c:\download); do not save setup.exe to c:\cygwin, as that is the default directory for the extraction and installation of the downloaded packages.
- Run setup.exe, you will see the welcome screen:
- Click Next to proceed to the next screen.
- Choose, Install from Internet, this will still save the package files to your download directory so that you can install Cygwin on any number of machines:
- Click Next to proceed to the next screen.
- The default Install Root is c:\cygwin which should be fine for most installations. Leave Default Text File Type as UNIX. Leave Install For set to All unless you lack local administrative privileges.
- Click Next to proceed to the next screen.
- Local Package Directory should default to the directory that you ran setup.exe from:
- Click Next to proceed to the next screen.
- Choose your proxy setup, or, just choose Direct Connection if no proxy is needed:
- Click Next to proceed to the next screen.
- Select your nearest mirror for downloading:
- Click Next to proceed to the next screen; setup will download a list of available packages as it moves to the next screen.
- On the next screen you will select the packages that will be downloaded and installed. A listing of the Cygwin/X packages is given below; a listing of the general Cygwin packages would be beyond the scope of this document.
Cygwin/X packages are located in the X11 category.
- xorg-server (required, the Cygwin/X X Server)
- xinit (required, scripts for starting the X server: xinit, startx, startwin (and a shortcut on the Start Menu to run it), startxdmcp.bat )
- xorg-docs (optional, man pages)
- X-start-menu-icons (optional, adds icons for X Clients to the Start menu)
- You may also select any X client programs you want to use, and any fonts you would like to have available.
- You may also want to ensure that the inetutils or openssh packages are selected if you wish to use telnet or ssh connections to run remote X clients.
- Click Next to begin the download process, you may want to try another mirror if you see a «Connecting» message on this screen for a long period of time:
- After the packages are downloaded, setup will automatically begin to install them:
- I highly recommend allowing Cygwin Setup to create Desktop and Start Menu icons for you; these icons simply launch a bash shell:
- Click Finish to close the setup program.
You have now successfully installed Cygwin/X. Proceed to Chapter 4 for instructions on how to use Cygwin/X