I must apoligize to the readers of this list. I have committed another punishable crime--> Over the holidays I installed the latest cygwin distribution. (http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/) This is a beta distribution that runs on top of Windows 9X, ME, or NT. Randolph is peering into the future with Plan 9. But cygwin is for those of us in the trenches still dragging a windows anchor around. If you've tried cygwin or delorie ports of common unix programs in the past, and had any possible use for them, it might be time to try again. A few months ago a rudimentary packaging system (although it's still based on tarballs) was started for a more efficient distribution of updates. I was surprised at how much is now working. Not just gcc, bash, perl, and the usual win32 capable gnu-ports, but a substantial portion of a working gnu system. On my cygwin system, and I added a few optional contributed components--it takes up about 350mb, and there are over 850 files in /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin. Yes, even "X 6.4" works in full screen mode. (although not perfectly) The whole system crawls compared to Linux, but it's nice not to have to boot as often just to run some bash script. Even the cdrecord tools work well under win32. Things like symlinks, permissions, threads, device access, and networking are still as broken as a native windows machine, but lots of stuff works well. I remember the dosemu project used to be called the "ugly duckling" of unix. And the samba, vnc, win4lin, vmware, djgpp, and many other projects also seem to be frowned on by the gnu/linux community for being too friendly with M$ products. In reality, most freeware (as in free speech) seems to co-exist well with proprietary software, and it's the commercial products which introduce incompatibilities for the sake of marketing and so-called "product differentiation." Cygwin is now distributed for free and it fills a need--how many times have you wished you had some basic unix tools on a windows box? If I don't get flamed too badly for this post, I'll write a short review of running gimp on -ouch- win32. Ralph
