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Using Cygwin on NT 4.0 and Win2000; a user experience
- From: Martin Buchholz <martin at xemacs dot org>
- To: cygwin at cygwin dot com
- Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 14:07:14 -0700
- Subject: Using Cygwin on NT 4.0 and Win2000; a user experience
- Reply-to: martin at xemacs dot org
Thank you very much for your work on Cygwin. It has allowed me to
create an environment in which a Windows machine is just another Unix
box somewhere on the network. I never log on to the Windows console,
except to perform occasional system administration (like upgrading Cygwin!).
However, everything is not perfect yet. Here are my impressions:
- The recent change to make NTFS files SPARSE by default is a
disaster -- less space and time efficient for "normal" files.
Please undo this. More details in a separate message.
- The "grep" package comes with a grep.exe (and no file "grep"), but
no egrep.exe (instead it has a "egrep"). Of course this is easy for
the user to fix, but the package should be fixed as well.
- There have been many reports of rsync hanging, accompanied by an
"rsync" process that cannot be killed by "kill -9". I have
experienced the same, but only on NT 4.0 SP6, not on Win2000.
- To fix the SPARSE file problem, I tried hacking the source. This
process could be better documented. In particular, it's not obvious
that you can do
../src/configure --prefix=/install ... && make && make install
and later you can copy the files from /install to their final
resting places in /bin, etc... Files often stop working when their PREFIX
is no longer around.
I couldn't figure out how to update cygwin1.dll without having to
wander over to the console (which is often several miles away...),
but I'm certain there's a way, and you
guys have figured it out. You should share your secret with us.
I imagine you could do
../src/configure --prefix=/install ... && make && make install
and create a (non-Cygwin) bootup script that checks if there's a
c:/cygwin/install/bin/cygwin1.dll and if so, moves it to c:/cygwin/bin/.
This bootup script would have to run before any Cygwin services like
sshd are started.
Martin
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