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Re: Portable Cygwin on a CD


On Tue, 6 May 2003 fergus@bonhard.uklinux.net wrote:

> The contributions over the past few days have helped a lot to make things
> clearer, and better. Thank you.
>
> 1. There was a suggestion that the CD might usefully start with a
> autorun.inf file. I feel a bit nervy about this. Two reasons: a. if the host
> machine has Cygwin available then I would be inclined first to investigate
> using that version, as the platform for any application I might be
> interested in running; b. and if the host machine may even be _running_
> Cygwin at the time the CD is inserted, what would be the potential confusion
> arising from an autorun script which would be something like "\bin\rxvt -e
> /bin/bash --login -i" or whatever?
>
> So the way I've got things set up at the moment is rather meagre on the
> automation. But it works (well, I think) as follows:
>
> 2. If the host machine does not have Cygwin, then insert the CD and
>
>     Start -> Run -> f:\bin\rxvt {switches}-e /bin/bash --login -i
>     mount -bfu f:/ /
>     {do stuff}
>     umount -A
>     ^D
>
> 3. If the host machine does have Cygwin, then try starting it up, inserting
> the CD, and
>
>     cd f:/usr/local/
>     {do stuff}
>     ^D
>
> which might work well, or not ...
>
> 4. In my case (and maybe others) this doesn't work at all well because when
> I attempt to {do stuff}, things are in the wrong place. So instead I start
> the host version of Cygwin with the intention of immediately (though
> temporarily) disabling it and utilising the CD-bound "local" resource as
> follows:
>
>     Start the host version of Cygwin
>     mount -m > a:/mount.tmp # or somewhere convenient
>     umount -A
>     {insert the CD}
>     f:/bin/mount -bfu f:/ /
>     {do stuff}
>     umount -A
>     f:/bin/bash a:/mount.tmp # to recover the host setup
>     ^D
>
> Personally I do not mind the explicit mount-ing and umount-ing, explicit
> references to the CD driveletter f:, etc. Actually the thought of
> irretrievably (or even retrievably) hosing the host Cygwin installation is
> frightening enough to make this explicit rather mechanical approach
> preferable to something automated, however elegant that approach would
> undeniably be.
>
> Fergus

Fergus,

FYI, you don't have to run the host version of Cygwin mount; you might as
well run the one on the CD.  The rationale is that if there are host
processes running, the host version of cygwin1.dll is loaded and you won't
be able to hotswap your version in, and if there aren't any processes
running, the mount from the CD can read the mount table just as well as
the one on the host drive.  So you can skip that step (hope this makes
sense).

So, the correct procedure seems to be the following:

Run a Windows program (i.e., the one that doesn't use cygwin1.dll) to
detect whether there is a cygwin installation on the system[*].  If there
is Cygwin installed on the host, run the "ps -ef" from the host to make
sure there are no Cygwin processes already running on the host (including
services).  If there are, you'll have to use the host Cygwin anyway,
'cause you can't have two versions of cygwin1.dll loaded at the same time.

If there are no host Cygwin processes, you can run "mount -m" from the CD
to save the host mounts, and, after you're done, run the saved batch file
using mount from the CD (by changing directory to F:\bin before running
the batch file).  As pointed out by Sam Edge, you should also check that
you aren't leaving any Cygwin processes behind before you run "umount
-A"...

Most of the above can be done by an autorun program.
	Igor
[*] This looks like a good use of setup's functionality.  Perhaps there
could be a small helper tool distributed with setup sources that uses
setup's capability of reading the mount points...  I'll look into writing
one in a month or so, unless someone beats me to it (*nudge*, *nudge*,
*wink*, *wink*).
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor@watson.ibm.com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
  -- Leto II


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