Windows NT setup problems with swarm and emacs

[Paul Johnson]

I'm teaching a class with swarm next semester and I'm preparing for the
inevitable: people use MS WIndows (ack!).

So i got an NT system, and it is tweaked just a bit so that the users
can't write in the software directories like program_files or Cygnus or
what not.  Only the administrator can do that. I found tips on an NT
site that told me how to make those changes, and the system works OK for
most purposes.

My goal is to get a clean understanding of how Swarm and Emacs for NT
and Cygnus can be installed/setup and used so the students don't get too
discouraged at the outset.
 
<whining sound>
The Swarm-2.0.1c package installed its settings for the administrator,
not for the users.
</whining sound>
Explanation/what I did:
First I installed the cygnus package. OK, administrator and users can
start bash shells.

Then I logged in as administrator and installed Emacs.  That part seems
OK. It seems all users can start emacs fine.

I did not figure how to make Emacs and cygnus stuff work together. Could
not see how to call gcc from inside emacs, for example, or even a shell.

Then I logged in as administrator and installed Swarm.  The
administrator's start menu has the Swarm=>terminal , and swarm starts
and appears to run OK for the administrator.  Swarm tweaked the
environment to make emacs be able to find the cygnus tools.  Regular
users, however, have no item in their Start menus and emacs does not
find the cygnus tools. Hmmm.  

My user's HOME environment variable is set as d:\home\pauljohn, if that
helps you understand the next problem.  At the time I did the swarm
install, my admininistrator user had no HOME set (swarm changed that). 
I learned the swarm install had set the HOME for the administrator to
c:\swarm-2.0 and it set some other variables, SWARMHOME and CYGFS and
CYGROOT and PATH.

I learned the Swarm->terminal menu item is just a link to bash.exe in
c:\cygwin\cygnus-b20\H-i586-cygwin32\bash.  I copied the .emacs and
.login from c:\swarm\ into my user directory. Then I tried to execute
the bash login.  Bad outcome.  It appears that the swarm install only
set the environment variables for my administrator, not regular users.
And, as a result, for regular users, the swarm shell does not because it
has no idea where the cygnus stuff is.  I can manually set environment
variables for CYGFS and CYGROOT to fix that. (I'm working through
my_computer->properties->environment)

However, here's what I can't get around. In order to make emacs and the
cygnus stuff work together, I need to ammend the PATH variable in the
environment of the user so that it includes Swarm-2.0\bin and
cygnus\cygwin-b20\H-i586-cygwin32\bin. However, when I try to change the
PATH environment variable as a user, not as administrator, the system
just ignores my changes.  On the other hand, the Swarm install did fix
the Path for the administrator, but for some reason that change does not
apply to all users.  

I understand these ownership problems would not affect your garden
variety win95/98 user?

-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700

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