Installing cygwin on your home computer

cygwin is a Unix environment that runs on your Windows computer, allowing you to use Unix programs in a Windows environment. It comes with a fairly intuitive setup program, which you can find at http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe. Download it and then execute it.

As with most setups, there are some choices you are allowed/have to make. A few of this can be a bit confusing.

Default Text File Type

Choose "Unix / binary (RECOMMENDED)".

Local Package Directory

For a download directory, pick a folder that the files can reside in for a while - Cygwin uses them later on if you want to change the installation, for example, to install additional tools or update already installed ones. If the files get deleted, Cygwin's setup can get confused and re-download packages, which is especially painful if you have a slow internet connection.

Choose a Download Site

I've found that http://mirror.rcn.net is a good host to choose, but feel free to experiment.

Select Packages

Like all things unix-y, cygwin is quite flexible - you get to choose which of the many, many programs that run under it you want to install. A reasonable set of programs are chosen by default. But, you'll want to add a few programs to the default installed list. The easiest way to do this is to click on the "View" button (upper right) until the dialog is showing the "Full" list. You can then find the additional packages we recommend from the alphabetically sorted list that is displayed.

Select these, in addition to the ones already selected, by clicking on "Skip" until a version number appears. The higher is the better.

Cygwin comes with a whole host of interesting packages that you can play with - browse through the categories and download things that you might like to play with.

You can run setup.exe every so often after the initial install to update the packages you have previously installed to the latest versions, to install new packages, and to uninstall previously installed ones.