address@hidden (John Sankey)] Cygwin/LilyPond wipeout

[janneke]

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Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 17:59:22 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <address@hidden>
From: address@hidden (John Sankey)
To: address@hidden, address@hidden
Subject: Cygwin/LilyPond wipeout
Reply-To: address@hidden

It seems that my mail to address@hidden is vanishing into
thin air. Would you post this as advice to anyone thinking of running
LilyPond under Cygwin?

If you are trying to instal Cygwin to run LilyPond under Windows NT,
expect problems. Lots of them.

MikTeX and Gsview install easily. But, several versions of the Cygwin
setup program have disabling bugs (including the version posted by
RedHat until 3 pm this afternoon). And, if you report such a problem
to the Cygwin mailing list, you will be told, in no uncertain terms,
that Cygwin is solely for "dedicated software developers and
programmers", not for mere users like me.

And, you wouldn't believe the mess a Cygwin install makes of an NT
disk! You have to defrag after install to avoid serious disk
slowdown. I note that Dklite, from http://www.executive.com, is free
and works very reliably for me.

Anyway, I've been at it for a week so far, and still haven't been
able to get as far as installing Jan's specially compiled version of
LilyPond on it. (Thanks again, Jan - I wish Cygwin and RedHat had a
few people like you!)

I've run out of IDE+partition space for RedHat Linux (it demands two
of the four partition slots on a disk, and they have to be below 8 GB
just like MSDOS and NT bootseg do), so I haven't much choice but to
keep trying with NT.

I'd sure rather be playing Scarlatti ...

John

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-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org