Cygwin 1.7 Released 203
Posted
by
timothy
from the christmas-present dept.
from the christmas-present dept.
jensend writes "The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility."
Does this do something SFU doesn't? (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows has had a POSIX layer of its own for awhile now, as "Services for Unix".
On the lighter-weight end, mingw can give you the basics, and they usually run much faster (even bash!) than Cygwin did. Maybe Cygwin is better now, it's just that I don't really see what it has over, well, any other way of running POSIX apps on Windows.
Do we finally have unicode support? (Score:5, Interesting)
For a while, I've been using a modified version of Cygwin [okisoft.co.jp] in order to get proper UTF-8 support. Does the new version finally integrate a similar feature?
I was never really impressed (Score:2, Interesting)
No dice -- it doesn't really integrate with the rest of the system very well, I find. Maybe I'm just not doing it right, but whatever. Then I gave up and grabbed SFU off of Microsoft's website. It was OK, but not really stellar. It's more for running batch jobs and giving something to code against than for interactive use, same as Cygwin I guess.
Eventually I got so pissed sick of it all that I just bought a MacBook Pro so that I could have a Unix-ish environment without having to worry about power management or weird wifi issues that I'd had with Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Slackware, ZenWalk, Mint, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PC-BSD on the Toshiba hardware.
So, I guess my question is -- is Cygwin meant for interactive use, or just to give the POSIX API and build environment so you can see whether or not your code will compile against a Unix machine? Because it seems like they've been putting an awful lot of effort into this for a very long time for it to suck so bad if its meant to be an interactive method of accessing a Windows machine by Unix commands.
Re:I was never really impressed (Score:4, Interesting)
Since Cygwin basically throws you into a command shell, it really does require an understanding of the fundamentals of Unix/Linux systems and how to work effectively in a shell. For example, I doubt many users of Slackware or NetBSD would have any substantial complaints about Cygwin. As someone who used Cygwin for years in a corporate environment where I could not use Linux, it was a godsend. I could spend my whole day working in Cygwin without having to mess with Windows development environments. Being able to throw together a bash script that uses grep, sed, awk, etc. is so nice for a stranded Linux user. However, many people do not learn the basic utilities anymore, even basic things such as customizing a login shell.
If there is a weak point in the Cygwin interactive experience, in my opinion it comes from the fact that the default Windows terminal program is used, which is slow and generally terrible compared to the modern Linux terminal apps. Maybe someday there will be a fast and full-featured replacement. But as it is, the Windows terminal is basically sluggish early 90's cruft that just isn't up to the task. Not a fault of Cygwin, but still a problem when running any such programs on Windows.
Re:makes windows marginally bearable (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:makes windows marginally bearable (Score:4, Interesting)
For *nix users, however, the reverse is usually true.
Making the half-assed GUI so lousy that people will actually prefer a command line interface is not the right way to go about doing things
Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't? (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple thousands of binaries of Linux apps installable with a couple of clicks, integrating with the system and each other?
How long, since you decide you want to, until you can start writing, compiling and running GCC, perl, python and such apps, on "Services for Unix"? On Cygwin it's about 20 minutes from which 15 you spend drinking coffee watching the progress bars.
Re:makes windows marginally bearable (Score:3, Interesting)
Copy and paste: getclip and putclip. But I usually abbreviate them to p and c with a couple of wrappers.
I find Cygwin integrates really well with the rest of Windows, particularly when you mount the right drives in directories off the root, so that you have /c/ etc., but still have access to Win32 apps. I practically live in my bash/rxvt shell.