re: downloading, installing, using Cygwin in MS Windows XP Professional

[Ray Brohinsky]

Lots of questions, yesssss! But none of them are
fatal, so take heart!

Karen Barrett wrote:
> There are so many questions, & probably some I'm not
aware of, so if you 
> know how to do the above, please let me know.  I
would very much like to 
> download the Brahms piano concerto #1 in Dm Op 15 --
>      Installation -- for "root directory", is
<C:/DRIVERS> OK?

Cygwin likes to install in a c:\cygwin directory, but
it will allow installation to another directory. It's
not a really good idea to install it in with other
windows stuff, IMHO, so unless you really can't abide
a cygwin directory, go with the default.

If you _must_ put it into drivers, can you put it into
c:\drivers\cygwin ?

Another thing that is very good to do: if you have a
space in your login name for XP, make a new user with
no spaces in it. Cygwin will, by default, set things
up to log in the default user, and all sorts of minor
but annoying problems happen if there's a space in the
name. Not least of these is that the CD to your home
directory fails, and leaves you in the root of the
cygwin drive (which would be c:\cygwin, but appears as
\ within cygwin).

>          For "default text file type", my internet
subscription service 
> (Baltimore County Public Library (BCPL)) says I
can't use UNIX because 
> it won't work with MS Windows and DOS would seem
potentially problematic 
> for MS XP Professional Windows.  So - what to do
here?

Your ISP is pretty fairly wrong on this count. First
off all, while notepad.exe really messes up display of
unix format text files, wordpad.exe (which is included
free in windows since 95) has no problem with them.
Second of all, while Lilypond won't have a fit over
DOS format text input, some other parts of cygwin may
not like them very much.

If your ISP was inferring that using cygwin in anyway
stops your computer from having XP as the OS, or that
your connection to the internet will be in any way
impeded by having UNIX as the default text format for
cygwin, they're wrong. Your OS is still XP. Cygwin
runs as an application within XP (or whatever
windows), and your dial up is still XP. I haven't
looked, but I don't even believe cygwin does the
dialup portion of connection. Any cygwin applications
such as telnet and ftp work fine once you have a
connection via XP.

>         On "local package directory" -- which one's
appropriate for me?  

I made a dir called c:\cyginst. Then I downloaded the
entire install there, and ran setup.exe a second time
to install cygwin _from_ that directory. It's a nice
obvious name, and once you're installed, you can just
delete it all. If you install from the internet, I
believe that the install directory is just used to
temporarily hold each module as it is downloaded and
installed, and anything, including c:\Temp would do.

> Why would I need all that stuff?  Is "current"
right? what would work here?

You need all that stuff to support Lilypond. It's
possible, even likely, that you won't use a lot of it.
I can't begin to tell you what you don't need. But if
you take the basic installation with the addition of
the lilypond stuff from the publishing part of the
tree, lilypond should work. The rest of it is good if
you have or want a familiarity with UNIX/linux, or if
you want to do any considerable amount of
handling/dealing-with unix files. But the minimum
should be quite functional.

I found early that it was good to include vim. vim is
one of those editors that you either grok immediately,
or hate forever. It has nice modern full-screen
editing abilities (unlike the original vi from whence
it springs). Many things about it are annoying. But it
works, and you can do it all from within cygwin.

On the other paw, I've found that Programmer's File
Editor, which is free and a windows application, can
edit unix format files without griping. You can get it
at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/

>         Shouldd I choose "direct connection"?

Get connected to the internet first. Then, use 'direct
connection'. No matter how you connected, the
setup.exe program will function. 

>         For download site -- which one works?  I
didn't choose sites 
> with ftp because I wondered about a UNIX connection.
 http sites were 
> immediately regurgigated by this monster.

Any of the sites _should_ be good. I tend, for no
really good reason, to lean towards the sites with
'lilypond' or 'nasa' in them. Go figger, they've
worked for me.

The transport protocol shouldn't matter that much.
Having 'ftp' or 'http' in the site name doesn't really
change the way that setup gets stuff from it (which
should be ftp.) If you're having problems with http
transfers, though, you might be firewalled or proxied.
I haven't had any problem going through a proxy or via
NAT (which is used by Internet Connection Sharing on
XP). You may need to talk to someone more technical
than the library who is local.

>        On one of my trips on this "merry"-go-round,
6 folders named bin, 
> etc, lib, tmp, usr and var appeared on my desktop
along with 3 more 
> Cygwin icons -- 1) dimensions 72 x 72 6.85KB, on dbl
right click it made 
> a blank window with a Cygwin icon in the middle and
a little toolbar row 
> on the bottom; 2) on double right click, this one
flashed very quickly 
> off; 3) "type MS-DOS Batch File Size: 95 bytes A
right click produced 
> properties, general, compatibility tabs.  I followed
the compatibility 
> instructions for windows and wound up with the
plethora of sites from 
> which to choose "get software from".  which one?

Sounds like an incomplete installation to me. THe rest
is mostly floobydust: XP's attempt to figure out how
to run something that can't run yet.

>           So, if you would send me directions
applicable to my situation 
> to install, download and use this lilypond/cygwin
software that any 
> dummy such as moi could use, I would much appreciate
it.  thank you
> 

I'd be glad to try to help if I can. We could take it
to private email, and then you can summarize the
results and post them on the list to avoid egregious
spammacious overbyte.

raybro