General overview

• Free GPL project. This port is still supported by the Red Hat Inc. as a free software project, but commercial support for Windows 2000 is discontinued. Parts are GNU software (gcc, gas, ld, etc...), parts are covered by the standard X11 license, some of it is public domain, some of it was written by Cygnus and placed under the GPL. None of it is shareware. You don't have to pay anyone to use it.

• "GNU + cygnus + Win32 = CygWin". The GNU tools have been implemented by writing a shared library (the Cygwin DLL) that adds the necessary UNIX-like functionality missing from the Win32 API (fork, spawn, signals, select, sockets, etc.). The new interface was called Cygwin API.

• Win32 UNIX-like interface for writing applications. Familiar environment for Unix users.

• It is Win32 (Win98/WinNT/Win2K) Unix port based on Win32 API (not MS POSIX!!!) The latest net releases of Cygwin are numbered 1.1.x or 1.3.x. 1.n.x versions of the Cygwin DLL are newer than previous beta Bxx (i.e. B19, B20, B20.1) versions. However, 1.<odd-number>.x versions of the DLL are still considered beta quality. The last commercial release was v1.0 which was only released on CD-ROM and is no longer available. Note that the 1.n.x version numbering refers only to the Cygwin DLL. Individual packages like bash, gcc, less, etc. are released independently of the DLL.

• The important thing to remember is that it's an interface sitting on top of Windows 2003.

• CygWin contains the largest number of ported GNU/Unix tools and applications !!!

Reference: http://www.cygwin.com.

Local setup/support

• No X-Windows interfaces/software !
• We support the CygWin as a "beta" software
• Most CygWin tools/software components are installed!
• Not all network protocols are installed