From time to time the Windows user may benefit from the capability and convenience of a particular tool traditionally used on a Unix platform. With the evolution of an increasingly osmotic desktop, solid Unix-like tools are being rapidly ported to and deployed in the Windows environment. The functionality achieved with these tools can range from a one-time file conversion all the way to a full-featured unix environment, cygwin, that runs on top of Windows.
Research Computing provides very limited support for these programs. It is up to you to:
Cygwin can be expected to run on all modern 32 bit versions of Windows, except Windows CE. This includes Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.When using Cygwin Setup for the first time, the default is to install a minimal subset of packages. If you want anything beyond that, you will have to select it explicitly. See http://cygwin.com/packages for a searchable list of available packages.
If you want to build programs, of course you'll need `gcc', `binutils', `make' and probably other packages from the "Devel" category.
2004-02-22 - xwinclip is not needed anymore. The integrated clipboard support (XWin.exe -clipboard) no longer steals the X selection and it works with most XDM servers.
MinGW: A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party DLLs.
MSYS: A Minimal SYStem to allow the typical POSIX/Bourne configure script to execute to create a Makefile so that you can execute make.
More information on Using the Borland 5.5 Compiler and command-line tools
Perl may be obtained from http://www.perl.com/pub/a/language/info/software.html The binary version will install the stable release. If you need the latest development version, you will need to compile from source.