Cygwin alternative

Gow - The lightweight alternative to CygwinDownload |Home Page |FAQAuthor: Brent R. MatzelleABOUTGow (Gnu On Windows) is the lightweight alternative to Cygwin. It uses aconvenient Windows installer that installs about 130 extremely usefulopen source UNIX applications compiled as native win32 binaries. It isdesigned to be as small as possible, about 10 MB, as opposed to Cygwinwhich can run well over 100 MB depending upon options.Here are a couple quotes from happy Gow users:"Gow is one of the few things that makes Windows bearable/usable""I use Gow constantly. It's awesome.""I just wanted to let you know that the GOW Suite is simply great - it isfar lighter than the Cygwin tool, and is extremely useful. "FEATURES & BENEFITSUltra light: Small, light subset (about 10 MB) of very useful UNIXbinaries that do not have decent installers.Shell window from any directory: Adds a Windows Explorer shell windowso that you can right-click on any directory and open a command(cmd.exe) window from that directory.Simple install/remove: Easy to install and remove, all files containedin a single directory in a standard C:\Program Files path.Included in PATH: All binaries are conveniently installed into theWindows PATH so they are accessible from a command-line window.Stable binaries: All commands are kept up to date but also as stable aspossible.OTHER LINKSRelease NotesContributingExecutables listUnix command referenceFEEDBACKPlease submit feedback via theGow issue trackerThank you for trying Gow!Copyright (c) 2006 - 2014 Brent R. Matzelle

Have the necessary build toolsinstalled; you at least need gcc-g++,make, automake,autoconf, git, perl,cocom and patch.Additionally, building the dumper utility requiresgettext-devel, libiconv-devel, libzstd-devel andzlib-devel. Building this program can be disabled with the--disable-dumper option to configure.Building those Cygwin utilities which are not themselves Cygwin programs(e.g. cygcheck and strace) also requiresmingw64-x86_64-gcc-g++ and mingw64-x86_64-zlib.Building these programs can be disabled with the --without-cross-bootstrapoption to configure.Building the documentation also requires the dblatex,docbook2X, docbook-xml45,docbook-xsl, and xmlto packages. Buildingthe documentation can be disabled with the --disable-docoption to configure.Next, check out the Cygwin sources from theCygwin GIT source repository).This is the preferred method for acquiring the sources.Otherwise, if you are trying to duplicate a cygwin release then you shoulddownload the corresponding source package(cygwin-x.y.z-n-src.tar.bz2). You must build cygwin in a separate directory fromthe source, so create something like a build/ directory.Assuming you checked out the source to/oss/src/newlib-cygwin/, and you want to install to thetemporary location /oss/install/, these are the requiredsteps to build Cygwin:$ mkdir -p /oss/src/newlib-cygwin/build # create build dir$ mkdir -p /oss/install # create install dir$ cd /oss/src/newlib-cygwin/winsup # chdir into Cygwin source dir and...$ ./autogen.sh # create config files$ cd /oss/src/newlib-cygwin/build # chdir into build dir$ # create makefiles...$ /oss/src/newlib-cygwin/configure --prefix=/oss/install$ make # build Cygwin$ make install # install Cygwin into install dirIf the build worked, you can install everything you like into the currentlyrunning system, except the Cygwin DLLcygwin1.dll itself. For installing the DLL, close downall Cygwin programs (including bash windows, any servers likecygserver, etc.), save your old dll, and copy the new dllto the correct place. Then, for first testing, start up a Cygwin programfrom the Windows command prompt and see what happens.If you get a lengthy error messages like"user shared memory version mismatch detected", it'svery likely a Cygwin process still running using the old DLL. Kill itin Windows' Task Manager or taskkill and try again.If

Reason, the Cygwin DLL maintains shared resources based ona hash value created from its own installation path. Each Cygwin DLLon the machine constitutes a Cygwin installation, with the directorythe Cygwin DLL resides in treated as "/bin", the parent directory as "/".Therefore, you can install two or more separate Cygwin distros ona single machine. Each of these installations use their own Cygwin DLL,and they don't share the default POSIX paths, nor process tables, norany other shared resource used to maintain the installation.However, a clean separation requires that you don't try to runexecutables of one Cygwin installation from processes running in anotherCygwin installation. This may or may not work, but the chances that theresult is not what you expect are pretty high.If you get the error "shared region is corrupted" or "shared regionversion mismatch" it means you have multiple versions of cygwin1.dllrunning at the same time which conflict with each other. Apart frommixing executables of different Cygwin installations, this could also happenif you have one a single Cygwin installation, for example, if you update theCygwin package without exiting all Cygwin apps (includingservices like cygsshd) beforehand.The only DLL that is sanctioned by the Cygwin project is the one thatyou get by running the Cygwin Setup program,installed in a directory controlled by this program. If you have otherversions on your system and desire help from the cygwin project, you shoulddelete or rename all DLLs that are not installed bythe Cygwin Setup program.If you're trying to find multiple versions of the DLL that are causingthis problem, reboot first, in case DLLs still loaded in memory are thecause. Then use the Windows System find utility to search your wholemachine, not just components in your PATH (as 'type' would do) orcygwin-mounted filesystems (as Cygwin 'find' would do).4.21.I read the above but I want to bundle Cygwin with

Switch from 32-bit Cygwin to 64-bit Cygwin, if your OS and CPU support that. With the bigger address space fork() is less likely to fail. Try setting the environment variable CYGWIN to "detect_bloda", which enables some extra debugging, which may indicate what other software is causing the problem. See this mail for more information. Force a full rebase: Run rebase-trigger fullrebase, exit all Cygwin programs and run the Cygwin Setup program. By default, the Cygwin Setup program automatically performs an incremental rebase of newly installed files. Forcing a full rebase causes the rebase map to be cleared before doing the rebase. See /usr/share/doc/rebase/README and /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/_autorebase.README for more details. Please note that installing new packages or updating existing ones undoes the effects of rebase and often causes fork() failures to reappear. See the process creation section of the User's Guide for the technical reasons it is so difficult to make fork() work reliably.4.46.How do I fix find_fast_cwd warnings?Older Cygwin releases asked users to report problems to the mailing list with the message: find_fast_cwd: WARNING: Couldn't compute FAST_CWD pointer. Please report this problem to the public mailing list cygwin@cygwin.comRecent Cygwin releases changed this to the message: This typically occurs if you're using an older Cygwin version on a newer Windows. Please update to the latest available Cygwin version from If the problem persists, please see is not serious, just a warning that Cygwin may not always be able to exactly emulate all aspects of Unix current directory handling under your Windows release.Unfortunately some projects and products still distribute older Cygwin releases which may not fully support newer Windows releases, instead of installing the current release from the Cygwin project. They also may not provide any obvious way to keep the Cygwin packages their application uses up to date with fixes for security