Olav writes:
> Does anyone have first hand knowledge of a product called CYGWIN?
>  Its a UNIX (posix) for windows environment.

I've played with it a bit.  It's basically a set of programs (shell and
utilities) plus some DLLs that provide the standard Unix kernel functions
and other libraries found on Unix.

You can run one of the shell programs and then it looks like you're in Unix.
It stores files as ordinary Windows files, but all of its programs use a
Unix view of things, looking in files like /etc/passwd, etc., so you end up
with a C:\etc directory, C:\usr, and so on to contain all of these "Unix"
files.

It's a relatively simple way to port a Unix application to Windows, apart
from the fact that the result will still be a Unix application, just running
under Windows.

In general my opinion is that it you want Unix you should run Unix, and if
you want Both Windows and Unix at the same time on the same machine then
you'd be better off using VMWare to create a virtual machine and run "real"
Linux inside that on top of Windows.  Of course this requires more hardware
resources (and a copy of VMWare) than using CygWin.

It kind of depends on what you want it for.

G.