Cygwin 2019 Latest Version Review for Windows 10. Cygwin is a a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows.
As described on the, Cygwin is free. It's a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows.
For our class, we use Cygwin as an alternative to X-Win32. The problem with X-Win32 is that it's not free.
USC has a licence for you to run X-Win32. When you are on campus, it's no problem to run X-Win32. But when you are at home, in order to run X-Win32, you have to run a Virtual Private Network (VPN) so your laptop/desktop would appear on the USC campus network. Also, once you have graduated from USC, if you want to continue to use X-Win32, you have to buy a license for yourself. Below are the steps to install and setup Cygwin on Windows 10. To make things easier to manage, let's create a folder on your Desktop and name it 'Cygwin Setup'.
Then point your browser to, click on the setup-x8664.exe link to download setup-x8664.exe. Save setup-x8664.exe into the Cygwin Setup folder on your desktop. (I'm assuming that your Windows 10 machine is a 64-bit machine. If you have a 32-bit machine, please download and run setup-x86.exe instead.) Cygwin will need at least 2GB of disk space to download and an additional 4GB of disk space to install. If you don't have more than 2GB of free disk space on your C: drive, you need to create the 'Cygwin Setup' folder somewhere else.
Go to your Desktop, click open the Cygwin Setup folder and click on setup-x8664.exe. If you get a screen asking you about permissions, please give permission to run the setup program. Click on the Next button in the Cygwin Setup window. You should see the following screen: Since you will be download a lot of files and you may lose connection to the Internet, it's best to do this in 2 steps. First time you run setup-x8664.exe, you should simply download all the files you need. When that's done, re-run setup-x8664.exe and install Cygwin from the files you have downloaded. I think this is the more reliable way to go.
So, click on the 'Download Without Installing' radio-button and click on Next. You will be asked to select a local package directory. For now, just keep the default and click on the Next button. You will be asked to select your Internet connection.
Unless you have some unusual setup, just keep the default and click on the Next button. You will be asked to choose a download site. Select a download site from the list and click on Next. My favorite is but you can choose any other site. It can take a few seconds to download some initial files.
Then you will see the following screen (or a full-screen version of it): By default, the base Cygwin system will be installed. But that won't be very useful for us. We need 2 more things.
openssh (a ssh client program). the entire X11 Window System (if we don't install this, when we ssh to another machine, we won't be able to run program there that has a graphical user interface) To do this, you first need to click the View drop-down list to change from 'Pending' to 'Category' and you will get the following screen: Scroll the window down look for the 'Net' category and click on the '+' box to open it up and and you will get the following screen: The items inside the 'Net' category are sorted alphabetically. Scroll the window down further (for quite a bit) and look for ' openssh' in the 'Net' category. When you find it, you will get the following screen: Click on the icon in the 'New' column to the left of 'Skip' once and the screen will change to the following: In the 'New' column, it tells you which version of ' openssh' will be included in your download (you may see a different version than what's shown above). By default, the checkbox in the 'Bin' column is checked and the checkbox in the 'Src' column is unchecked so that you will download just the binaries and not the source.
Also look for the 'Editors' category and find a package called 'nano' and select it for installation (screen shots not provided). Now scroll all the way down so that you can see the 'X11' category. You will get a screen that looks like the following: Click on the icon to the left of 'Default' once and 'Default' should change to 'Install' and it should look like the following: By default, tcsh is not included in the standard installation of Cygwin. If you would like to have tcsh included in the download, you can find tcsh in the 'Shells' category and select it for installation (screen shots not provided).
Now you are ready to download Cygwin. Click on the Next button.
The next screen you will see asks you to confirm changes. Just click on the Next button.
At this point, Cygwin Setup will download the Cygwin package to a subfolder inside the Cygwin Setup folder on your desktop. How long this takes depends on the speed of your machine and the speed of your Internet connection. If you get a popup window saying that there is an error and you can retry, just click on the Retry button (don't skip it or you have to reinstall everything). When download is completed, your screen should look like the following: Click on the Finish button to close Cygwin Setup. Now that you have Cygwin downloaded.
The next step is to install it. Go to your Desktop, click open the Cygwin Setup folder and click on setup-x8664.exe. (If you are running Windows 10 Professional, you should right-click on setup-x8664.exe and select 'Run As Administrator', if you know the admin password.) Click on the Next button in the Cygwin Setup window. Click on the 'Install from Local Directory' radio-button and your screen should look like the following: Click on the Next button to proceed with installation. You will see a screen that looks like the following: You can change the installation directory if you'd like.
We will keep the default and install Cygwin into your C: drive. Click on the Next button to proceed. You will be asked to select a local package directory. The default value is the Cygwin Setup folder you started with and that should be the correct place. Just click on the Next button to proceed. You will see, except that it's displaying the Categories already.
At this point, you need to, again, select openssh and X11 to be installed. So, you should do exactly what you did before.
Scroll down to find the 'Net' category. Click the '+' icon to open the 'Net' category. Scrool further down to find openssh inside the 'Net' category and make sure that it's selected for installation (i.e., it doesn't show 'Skip' in the 'New' column). Click the '+' icon to open the 'Editors' category. Scrool further down to find nano inside the 'Editors' category and make sure that it's selected for installation (i.e., it doesn't show 'Skip' in the 'New' column). Then scroll all the way down to look for the X11 category.
It's probably showing 'Default'. Click on the icon to the left of 'Default' once and 'Default' should change to 'Install'. Now you are ready to install. Click on the Next button to install Cygwin. This can take a long time since it's copying and setting up a lot of stuff. When installation is about to finish, you may get a popup window saying that you have 'Postinstall script errors'.
Please read what's in the window. If it says that these do not necessarily mean that it will cause packages to fail, then it's okay to proceed. If there are more serious errors, you may have to reinstall everything since some important packages may be broken. When installation is done, you will see the following screen: You should check both checkboxes and then click on the Finish button to close Cygwin Setup. After installation has completed, you should have a new icon, labeled 'Cygwin64 Terminal', on your desktop. If you double-click on it, the Cygwin Terminal program will run and you will see something like the following (your user namd and directory name will most likely be different): You also need to start the X11 server if you need to ssh to another machine and be able to run programs that have a graphical user interface. All you need to do is to click on your Windows' Start Menu, scroll down to the C section and look for Cygwin-X folder, click on it, and look for the 'XWin Server' icon.
It may look something like the following: Drag the 'XWin Server' icon onto your desktop and you are all set! If you cannot find the 'XWin Server' icon in the Start Menu, look for it in The ' ProgramData Microsoft Windows Start Menu Programs Cygwin-X' folder in your C: drive and copy 'XWin Server' to your desktop. To start the X11 server, just click on the 'XWin Server' icon on your desktop.
(If you are running Windows 10 Professional, you should right-click on the 'XWin Server' icon and select 'Run As Administrator', if you know the admin password. You should do it this way every time you want to start the X11 server.) In a few seconds, you should get a couple of icons in your system tray that looks like the following: left icon (with a green X) is the 'X Applications Menu' and the right icon (with a black X) is the 'Cygwin/X Server'.
If you click on the 'X Applications Menu' and click on the 'System Tools' submenu, you can see that there are a bunch of terminals available to you. Selecting the 'Cygwin Terminal' there is the same as running the 'Cygwin64 Terminal' on your desktop. You will also get a little icon at the top of your screen. That program is called ' fbxkb' and it's showing what kind of keyboard layout you have. If you want to get rid of it, you can open a Terminal program and open a text editor to edit the ' /etc/X11/xinit/startxwinrc' file and delete the following 3 lines near the bottom of that file: if -x /usr/bin/fbxkb -a 'x$IMSETTINGSMODULE'!= 'xIBus' ; then /usr/bin/fbxkb & fi If you cannot save the updated ' /etc/X11/xinit/startxwinrc' file due to permissions problem, you should do: cp /etc/X11/xinit/startxwinrc /.startxwinrc and edit ' /.startxwinrc' and remove those 3 lines. Unfortunately, even if you do all this, you can end up with a white box where the icon used to be! I know this is really annoying, but I don't know how to get rid of it.
Finally, to shutdown your X server, you can click on the 'X Applications Menu' and click on 'XDG Menu' and select 'Exit'.
There exist some scripts, which can be used as simple package managers for Cygwin. But it’s important to know, that they always will be quite limited, because of.ehm.Windows. Installing or removing packages is fine, each package manager for Cygwin can do that. But updating is a pain since Windows doesn’t allow you to overwrite an executable, which is currently running. So you can’t update e.g. Cygwin DLL or any package which contains the currently running executable from the Cygwin itself.
There is also this note on the page: 'The basic reason for not having a more full-featured package manager is that such a program would need full access to all of Cygwin’s POSIX functionality. That is, however, difficult to provide in a Cygwin-free environment, such as exists on first installation. Additionally, Windows does not easily allow overwriting of in-use executables so installing a new version of the Cygwin DLL while a package manager is using the DLL is problematic.' Cygwin’s setup uses Windows registry to overwrite executables which are in use and this method requires a reboot of Windows. Therefore, it’s better to close all Cygwin processes before updating packages, so you don’t have to reboot your computer to actually apply the changes. Installation of a new package should be completely without any hassles.
I don’t think any of package managers except of Cygwin’s setup.exe implements any method to overwrite files in use, so it would simply fail if it cannot overwrite them. Some package managers for Cygwin: Update: the repository was disabled recently due to copyright issues. It the owner of the repository issued the DMCA takedown on his own repository and created a new project called Sage (see bellow). The best one for me. Simply because it’s one of the most recent. It doesn’t use Cygwin’s setup.exe, it rather re-implements, what setup.exe does. It works correctly for both platforms - x86 as well as x8664.
There are a lot of forks with more or less additional features. For example, the is one of the improved versions, which is really great. Apt-cyg is just a shell script, there is no installation. Just download it (or clone the repository), make it executable and copy it somewhere to the PATH: chmod +x apt-cyg # set executable bit mv apt-cyg /usr/local/bin # move somewhere to PATH #.and use it: apt-cyg install vim There is also with different features. Another package manager implemented as a shell script. I didn't try it but it actually looks good. It can search for packages in a repository, list packages in a category, check dependencies, list package files, and more.
It has features which other package managers don't have. Fork of abandoned original with improvements and bugfixes. It has quite a lot of features and it's implemented in Python. Installation is made using make. If you used Chocolatey to install Cygwin, you can install the package cyg-get, which is actually a simple wrapper around Cygwin’s setup.exe written in PowerShell. Cygwin’s setup.exe It also has a.
Moreover, it allows you to upgrade all installed packages at once (as apt-get upgrade does on Debian based Linux). Example use: setup-x8664.exe -q -packages=bash,vim You can create an alias for easier use, for example: alias cyg-get='/cygdrive/d/path/to/cygwin/setup-x8664.exe -q -P' Then you can, for example, install Vim package with: cyg-get vim. Sage is a fork of apt-cyg by its most active contributors over the past year or two (Steven Penny). It appears that earlier this year he had some disagreement with the original apt-cyg author (Stephen Jungels) and issued the DMCA takedown when he forked the project. Since Jungels (aka Transcode) is verifiably the original author of the project, GitHub restored the original project soon after.
Currently, both projects are available – though the original project hasn't had any new code updates since the split. It’s a messy situation, really. – Dec 9 '16 at 13:26.