Re: Cygwin 1.7 on a FLASH Drive

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel at bmts dot com>]

Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
> Ralph Hempel wrote:
> > Yes, I've read the FAQ on making Cygwin portable :-)
> >
> > I'd like to have a complete Cygwin environment on a FLASH
> > drive, but of course using that drive to compile stuff in
> > my HOME directory will be awfully slow.
>
> Why is that?

Creating, wand writing files is much slower on a FLASH
drive than on a hard disk. Not a big problem for a few
files here and there, but if I'm compiling gcc and binutils for
cross compiling to an ARM (for example) it might be MUCH
slower.

> > Is there a way to create a symlink of a directory on a local
> > hard drive to the cygwin /home/username/ directory?
>
> No, not across volumes.  You could try 'junction', which does
> something "similar" in Windows land.

Just similar enough to be dangerous from what I hear...

> > Are there any features in 1.7 that will make a portable
> > cygwin easier to maintain?
>
> There will be no mount table in the registry.

This is, of course, very good.

Now that I think about it, one way that having a common Cygwin install
will help me is on my development laptop. I'm running XP as the host
OS and have a lot of virtual Win2K machines set up for testing in
clean sandboxes.

By having one canonical "known good" Cygwin install that's visible
as a shared drive to the virtual machines, I think I can get
what I want without using a USB drive.

Sorry for the noise, just musing aloud I guess...

Ralph

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/