Cygwin

Cygwin is a system of software development tools for Windows based on GNU Software. It behaves somewhat like the Linux development system - in fact it is often useful for porting Linux software to Windows. Another set of GNU development tools for Windows is Mingw.

Install Cygwin

• Go to the Cygwin homepage
• Download setup.exe from one of the Install Cygwin Now links
• Run setup.exe by double-clicking the downloaded program icon
• Usually you can accept all of the default options (keep clicking "Next") but make sure they fit your setup

Using Cygwin

• To Launch the Cygwin console, use the desktop icon or Start Menu/Programs/Cygnus Solutions/Cygwin Bash Shell
• To change directories, use the "cd" command with forward slashes (/) to seperate directories instead of backslashes (\)
• You can run multiple commands on the same line by seperating them with semicolons (;) like this:

  ./configure; make; make install