Apr 15 2000 DJ Delorie dj@redhat.com
Revised Aug 23 2000 David Starks-Browning starksb@ebi.ac.uk

This is the README for the Cygwin download area.

* What is Cygwin?

See http://cygwin.com/ .

* How do I install cygwin?

Download <http://cygwin.com/setup.exe> and run it. Or run it directly
from your browser. This will then download the list of available
packages, and offer to install them for you. There are a number of
options within setup to control installation details.

Using setup.exe is the supported way to install Cygwin. If you know what
you're doing, you *could* download things "by hand", however. For some
info on this check out: http://cygwin.com/download.html . Please don't
bother the cygwin mailing list with questions about doing things the hard
way. If you need to ask questions, you probably should be using setup.exe.

* Some things to keep in mind...

- Shut down all Cygwin applications before running setup! This
means bash, inetd, and ssh, too.

- If you download the .tar.bz2 files manually, check
<http://cygwin.com/mirrors.html> and use a mirror near you.
Don't even attempt to ftp directly from cygwin.com,
downloads are not allowed from the main site.

- If you have Network Associates (formerly McAfee) anti-virus
software running, consider disabling it during setup. There have
been reports that NAI anti-virus products will "hang" when
processing Cygwin .tar.bz2 archives.

- Make sure you have enough disk space. A new, full Cygwin
installation will use about 75MB of disk space in the "root"
directory. Setup will keep copies of the .tar.bz2 files it uses in
the directory where you ran it, in subfolders 'latest' and
'contrib'. This could be as much as about 30MB. (If you are an
NT Domain User with a Roaming Profile, you may need to take care
that setup doesn't store these on your Desktop.) If you get the
-src.tar.bz2 archives also, that's another 75MB or so.

* What configuration options does setup allow?

You can:
- Download from Internet to Current Directory
- Install from Internet
- Install from Current Directory

When installing, you will have to specify:
- install root directory (default is C:\cygwin)
- Default Text File Type ("DOS" or "Unix")
- Install For ("All" or "Just Me")

Choose "DOS" if you want text files to have \r\n line endings (like
NOTEPAD.EXE requires), or "Unix" for \n line endings.

Choose "All" if you want the Cygwin mount table to be available to
anyone who logs into the machine. (Recorded in the registry under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. May require Administrative privileges on Windows
NT.) Choose "Just Me" otherwise. (Recorded in the registry under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER.)

Network proxy settings are currently taken from Internet Explorer 5.
If you must get through a firewall or proxy server, and do not have
IE5 installed and configured properly, you will probably have to
download packages manually as described above.

Note that setup.exe is a work in progress. Expect features to be
missing, or to change in the future. For example, there is currently
no uninstall option.

* How do I build from source?

You need the <whatever>-src.tar.bz2 files. Some packages require
other packages (cygwin/*-src.tar.bz2 is a common requirement, as is
common/*-src.tar.bz2).

If you are really serious about building from source you may want to
set up CVS on your system so that you can use the latest development
sources. Check out the cygwin web site for more details.

In any case, be prepared to do some tweaking. It's unlikely that
everything will build on your system without some modification. (Such
as dependencies on other packages that are not distributed with Cygwin.)

* Where do I get help?

Start at http://cygwin.com/ .

Be sure to check the /usr/doc and /usr/doc/Cygwin directories for any
README files. These will contain special instructions for specific
packages, if relevant.

After you've read the docs and the FAQ, and searched the mailing list
archives, then you may send mail to <cygwin@cygwin.com>. This
is a general, public forum for all Cygwin users.