100 fun with Cygwin

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. We must hang loose, for bumps and blind alleys are part of the landscape in open-source computing — but isn't that true of computing with commercial software, too?

Here is our lab exercise.

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)

More suggestions from a variety of sources: First, some pages about window managers. Google "X tweak" for a few hundred thousand other suggestions.

If you use Microsoft Windows, your window manager is a program called Explorer — not Internet Explorer, but its antecedent (Desktop) Explorer. You can replace it, same as you do an X window manager. Conceptually and logistically, it may be easier to make changes among X window managers first, once you have one.

Many window managers are made to go with GNOME or KDE, which are look-and-feel or desktop packages. You might have noticed GNOME as one of the options we didn't choose in setting up Cygwin. That would make for a heavy load, not on Linux alone, but rather on Cygwin on top of Microsoft Windows. Check the screenshots link on X.Cygwin page to see some of the possibilities.

The window managers we use in the lab exercise above last week are openbox (check out the Configuration topic of the Docs page), fvwm, and twm, all of which can be reconfigured until you run out of time. Twm is probably the easiest to start with; the twm link here includes other people's twmrc files that you can study.

Other relative lightweights (compared to those that run on Gnome and Kde) include WindowMaker (wm) and Blackbox. (Blackbox is one of the possible replacements for Microsoft Explorer.)