From: "Terrell W. Fritz"
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2001 20:11:10 -0600
Subject: [TSSP] UNIX for Windows
Hi All, As you know, Paul uses UNIX for his programming. This makes it sort of hard for the rest of us to run his programs in the Microsoft Windows world. However, there is a wonderful -->free<-- UNIX shell program at: http://cygwin.com/ It is a big 63Mbyte download and it installs about 120Mbytes of files but it gives you a super nice UNIX $ prompt. Much like the dos prompt in windows. I ran a bunch of test programs of Paul's and they ran perfectly. It does not mess with the system or registry so you just delete the files if you want to uninstall it. It is very painless once you get past the size. It runs under Windows 9x, ME, 2000, NT. Much more information is at the site above. It has a simple installation program that basically unpacks the files where you want and makes an icon. It can also keep track of revision levels for updates but it seems very mature. Apparently it has been around awhile. I also have "UNIX in plain English" ISBN 1-55828-345-5 MIS: Press Reichard and Johnson which is basically a beginner's book on UNIX to let you know how to make a directory and move a file and stuff. Although, you can still use all the windows tools too. I really like the side by side DOS and UNIX equivalent tables ;-) Most commands are very similar... So you know how much "I" know about UNIX now ;-)) Cygwin seems to have all the C C++ FORTRAN... and all the typical UNIX tools included. It has the GCC compiler to make Paul's C program's into executables. It also has zip unzip and the native tar compression programs. So if you are a 32 bit Windows user without LINUX or your tired of rebooting into LINUX, I can highly recommend this one. It worked out amazingly smoothly and it seems to love Paul's programs and lets the rest of us play too ;-)) I am not sure if it is much slower but it seems fast enough to me. There is a screen capture at: http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Ptest1.jpg This removes the problem of trying to convert Paul's programs to Windows style C language programs which is really hard for me since I don't know much about C either ;-)) If 63MB is too much for your old 14.4k BPS modem ;-)) I can burn the thing onto CDrom and send it to you. Cheers, Terry
Maintainer Paul Nicholson, paul@abelian.demon.co.uk.