100 plans for Wednesday, April 13

We will be downloading, installing, and running Cygwin on computers in the lab. Cygwin is a Unix/Linux workalike that runs on a Microsoft Windows machine. This means that you can get the functionality of a Unix box on a Windows box, although at a slower speed, because Windows is still running underneath Cygwin. If it be not perfect, however, it is still good, and it is worthwhile because it allows us to experiment with Unix/Linux without putting a working Windows installation at risk. Our work will include the X windowing system. You may find that it's just like play...
Here are some of the pages that have been useful to me in my study of Cygwin:
From Robert Kline, a professor of computer science at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, installation notes for students with a mission similar to ours
From David Paik, a researcher in bioinformatics at Stanford, installation notes for a programmer working in graphics (his work is in doing virtual colonoscopy)
Bumps and blind alleys are just part of the landscape in open-source computing — but isn't that true of computing with commercial software, too? What we do this week will get you started in exploring Unix/Linux and X for yourself.