I can't seem to get a handle on the difference between the two.
It seems that one (GNUWin32) is an layer on top of windows (like MSYS) and the
other (cygwin) is something else (?)
What does that mean? When would I use one over the other? Are they both suited for the same thing?
I want to use it mainly for git but want to keep my options open for learning and doing all thing *nixy.
Is there another tool for this? Will msysgit be better suited for this?
Are there any resources that go through the differences of all of these *nix platforms exhaustively?
Cygwin is a library that endeavours to make UNIX programs able to compile and run on Windows systems with minimal or no modifications, and a comprehensive set of packaged UNIX tools and applications compiled with this library. It is almost a complete wrapper around Windows. It includes an X server and an awful lot of the programs that you can expect to find in a Linux distribution. It is great for people who want to learn or use the UNIX command line in Windows.
MSYS is mostly a port of the UNIX tools necessary to build GNU style packages (with a configure etc) on Windows systems with the MinGW compiler. It uses a variant of the Cygwin library modified to sacrifice some compatibility for efficiency, and is more Windows-friendly.
GnuWin32 is simply a port of some of the GNU tools to Windows. Like MSYS, it uses msvcrt.dll, as well as an additional library to provide some UNIX compatibility functions. Its main purpose appears to be to allow Windows programs and batch files to use some of the GNU programs and libraries directly.
For the most part, they all provide UNIX programs on Windows, but there are many subtle differences, including:
Intent. Cygwin is for people who want to use UNIX on their Windows OS. MSYS is for people who want to build Windows programs using the GNU/UNIX build tools. GnuWin32 is a port of individual GNU programs and libraries to Windows.
Text files, particularly line endings. Cygwin lets you use CR/LF or LF. MSYS expects LF line endings. GnuWin32 programs expect CR/LF line endings.
Supplied programs. In particular, Cygwin has a lot more packages, and GnuWin32 doesn't provide any shells.
As for git, it is available with Cygwin - this version can be used in a Windows directory (accessible under /cygdrive). Also, as mentioned, there is msysgit.
Michael Slade is correct. I would like to talk about the typical usage environment.
For practical reasons I use gnuwin as a light backend for stuff only remotely related to POSIX environments while cygwin is more of a full blown POSIX and even a very gnunixish environment.
Also gnuwin tends to become bloated when installing lots of tools because the executables are often using statically linked libraries. Cygwin on the other hand delivers a ton of dynamical libraries and rather small executables. So if you only need a few executables then gnuwin needs less resources. If you need a complex environment then cygwin will be more efficient.
gnuwin is also often slightly outdated, offers few software, no package/update-manager. It is a basic shell environment. No ssh, no gcc, vim, no perl, no sql - you can get these from other sources but how these cooperate is hard to predict.
Cygwin fixes all above problems.
In other words, gnuwin is great for the occasional installer, for just putting du, find and sort in your $PATH. To do some real POSIX work use cygwin.
I once had a second Linux workstation, then a Linux VM running next to my windows system. Cygwin made them obsolet. It is good enough for a ton of things while saving tons of resources in comparison to a dedicated computer or a VM.
Related
I have to check installation steps of my application on different production machines. I want to check how can I install my application on HP UX. I have only linux/windows machines but dont have real physical HP unix machine. Is there any way i can check installation steps of HP unix. I am thinking of any virtual environment or any flavour that run on linux or windows which gives accessiblity and functionality of HP unix.
I am looking something to cross check platfrom installation steps.
The short answer is no. HP-UX is as different from Linux as Linux is from Windows (almost). There would be many differences in libraries, patches, installed utilities, build tools, etc.
A few examples:
HP-UX does not come pre-installed with the bash shell
HP-UX uses a proprietary software packager and installer called swinstall (analogous to RPM but completely different)
Partition layout is different
Many common utilities behave differently. "echo" is one of many examples. This will affect things if your build process uses shell utilities
Even if you can test the install, don't you need to test the product's operation on HP-UX?
Not saying it's impossible. If your application uses basic, nonspecific utilities for install, it might work. There is no way to know without a running installation. Unfortunately you need Itanium hardware and the O/S.
My recommendation would be to get your application working on Solaris and any other Unixes first. The more platforms you test on, the more portable your code will become on all of them. Then, put out some feelers and find someone with a system you can borrow time on.
Worst case, find an Itanium server like an rx2620 on eBay, should not cost too much. Even better if the seller forgets to wipe the O/S :). You'll need a terminal and possibly null modem. 11.31 (11iv3) is the latest version of the O/S.
Any way to make a binary in a Linux distribution and run it on another distribution with same architecture? Or I should compile and build it on different distributions?
Is there any compatibility between Redhat, Debian based distributions for binary files?
(I want to use my Ubuntu binary file on fedora!)
Enter Linux Standard Base to reduce the differences between individual Linux distributions.
See
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
Statically linking your binaries makes them LESS portable because some libraries won't then work correctly for that machine (differing authentication methods, etc).
If you statically link any "unusual" libraries and keep your set of supported distros to a minimum, you should be ok.
Don't statically link the C library (or the whole binary), that's a recipe for trouble :)
Look at what (e.g.) Google do with Chrome.
What language is your application coded in? If its in a language like Python, (and no C bindings) or Java or any other VM based language, then I think you can trust the VM to make sure your application will work on the different Linux distributions.
Also, there is the Linux Standard Base which you can refer to.
HTH,Amit
I realize this is a very old question, but it comes up high in search results and this hasn't been mentioned:
CDE is a tool to create portable Linux applications. This tool packages together all needed files (including libraries) by analyzing at run-time. I have used it successfully on command-line tools several times, one example being getting tcpdump to run on a old hardware appliance running a custom distribution. CDE also doesn't require source, it just packages an executable you are able to run.
At one point I had an error running the cde command which was fixed by prepending the command with LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1, this might not be necessary in recent versions as it was years back.
Code is also on GitHub: https://github.com/pgbovine/CDE
It works. But it also depends on the version of the shared libraries you use, including libc, libstdc++ which are forced by the compiler version that may differ from distro to distro.
The best way is to distribute the source code and to make it easy to build the source on any reasonable Linux distribution. This is better than binary distribution because it is not enough to make the binary compatible with shared libraries. You also need to make sure you adapt your program to things like distribution specified locations and conventions for where web apps go, or how e-mail is sent, or how services are started, or how to determine the default paper size, or a myriad of other details.
See for example the Debian Policy Manual for a document describing many of the things a distribution needs to decide to ensure compatibility between applications running on it. You don't need to read it through or learn it by heart, but it shows the scope of the issues that may trip you.
You should probably work together with several of the major distributions to ensure your application works well with all of them. Most distributions' developers will happily help if you approach them politely. If you're lucky, you can attract volunteers from the distros to make the binary packaging for you, and that will quickly give you feedback on what you need to change at the source level to make your application easy to package.
The Linux Standard Base already mentioned by others attempts to work out a cross-distribution solution to these variables, but it is not comprehensive and not fully supported by most distributions. However, most distributions consider it a problem if they accidentally break LSB compatibility.
Normally it's ok to use binaries across linux distributions as long as you have the same set of libraries available. You can use 'ldd' to check which libraries are needed by a binary. libc should sure have the same version in the distributions involved.
You could statically link your executables for portability.
LSB is definitely worth checking out. Though in regards of working with libraries I was most satisfied by this answer here at SO https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1209674/shipping-closed-source-application-for-linux/1242738#1242738 and this detailed treatment of the rpath mechanism http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/notes/rpath.html
How about HTML?
It's cross platform, it's been around forever, and if you consult caniuse, and you know your target environment. It can render any UI I ever dreamt of, and if you're willing to learn javascript, you can approach this from a server programming perspective and a client programming perspective, without switching languages, which comes in handy if you're the one doing both.
It's probably the closest thing we have to a machine lingua france these days, and that is a good thing, because that means there's potentially more pickins for everybody involved.
People don't know that the web browser does most things you would want from a program, including rendering 3D graphics and PGP style encryption.
The biggest benefit I see in the browser as a platform is that everyone's nephew knows how to install a browser on a new computer, and from there it's just a url away, including packaging in some of the stores.
I like to program at my college's computer labs (a Windows environment). Unfortunately, the labs have IDEs & compilers for classes being taught that particular semester, which usually comes down to C, C++, and Java. I'm at a point where it's good for me to play around with a lot of different languages. I'd like to be able to do with from my flash drive.
I am also considering scripting languages (like portable Python) or languages/frameworks/runtimes that may require other programs (PHP needs a whole web stack).
What languages and tools can I use (scripted is OK!) to code and compile without having to install anything on the lab computers, and can be run from and saved on a USB flash drive?
Anything that runs on any operating system...
Qualification: the QEMU virtualizer is a fairly typical sort of PC emulator with the very unique feature that it can run without the help of an installer to set up it's environment. Thus you can create a VM image on your USB drive with the programming tools of your choice, for the operating system of your choice, and along side that, the QEMU executable, and you're set.
That said, the Windows port of QEMU appears to be abandoned, and its latest, 0.9.1, is dog slow.
You might be able to get another emulator with better performance to work, but this isn't supported out of the box, as far as i'm aware.
This kind of setup has some advantages, since the environment you'll be running is really your own, no matter which computer you happen to be sitting in front of.
you can try Portable Python.
Javascript. Works everywhere with a browser and a text editor (in your case, Notepad).
You can run XAMPP from a USB flash drive. And if you need an IDE, you can put eclipse on your flash drive, too.
Have you looked at DevC++ Portable? Also, Portable Python plus a portable editor like Notepad++ will give you a fairly sweet setup.
Eclipse is nice because it requires no install - just copy the eclipse directory to wherever you want it. If java is too boring for you, install the scala plugin and blow your mind away.
Any language can be done provided you can fit your libraries and compiler (or interpreter) on it.
Quick Basic works off of a flash drive...
Strawberry Perl Portable will give you Perl.
You can program Tcl/Tk by installing the single file distribution called "tclkit". You can even put tclkits for multiple platforms on a single drive so you can develop on windows, the mac or most unix boxes from the same drive.
For each platform there's nothing to install but the single executable to get a full implementation of tcl/tk including all of the GUI components.
AutoHotkey is good for windows.
emacs with its elisp is portable as well.
Clojure is impressively portable, it just requires a JVM (which your college machines should have, since you mention they're used for Java development)
Go to the downloads, get the latest release (currently 1.0.0), extract it and run from the command line:
java -cp clojure-1.0.0.jar clojure.lang.Repl
..and you'll get dropped to the Clojure REPL.
You can run a script, saved as a text file (named myscript.clj) with:
java -cp clojure-1.0.0.jar clojure.main myscript.clj
You can use Groovy. Works using JVM ...
Is there any lightweight *nix OS dedicated for programming purposes?
Actually, I have a full installation of Mandriva in my computer; but sometimes in Windows I must use Virtualbox to run some *nix OS.
Because I only need the OS for only programming in this case, so I just want to ask you about it. Of course, I searched about this on the net; but I also want to have your opinions...
Basically I need C/C++, Java, Python environment.
The only Linux distro you should use is Arch Linux. Please read why it is so great for developers :)
I'm an Arch Linux user, so my opinion may be biased.
Actually, a machine that you do development on shouldn't be lightweight. It should be heavy. full of compilers, interpreters, profilers, debuggers, IDEs, editors, benchmarks, checked-out code from repos, development versions of system libraries, test suites, generated large test files, backup tools, virtual machines, chroots, music to set-up comfort environment, mail, office suite to do the paperwork.
I mean, install Putty and connect to your machine (a), or do all development on virtual machine (b), that is kept on external hard drive (that's what I did, when I needed this), so you can use it everywhere where VirtualBox can run.
As for linuxes, I personally would like to use Gentoo Linux, as it can be customized to be lightweight. But unless you're really experienced with all linux administration stuff, customization may take a lot of time. So as a (c) variant, I'd advise to use any distribution (like your Mandriva), because normally base system takes about 10% of "weight" that you need for development on top of that.
And, by the way, boot speed is irrelevant on VirtualBox, since you can save virtual machine state entirely on hard drive and restore it within seconds.
I recommend xubuntu. I keep a full programming environment on a 4GB thumb drive with me at all times... just in case. :-)
I have a Debian install with X, windowmaker, firefox, vim, gcc, make and dependencies. Also, source control tools. Not much more, other than stuff that's useful in shell scripts. About 1.4G used on disk. Boots quickly. Very little BS involved.
I used to use OpenBSD on my old laptop. Similar to the above, but even more minimalist. You upgrade the OS with tar and patch. :-) Very nice, very small. Only reason I switched away from it is because I got a new machine which needed ndiswrapper for wifi...
PS: seems like this should be a community wiki...
Don't forget about Cygwin, which gives you a Unix-like environment right within your Windows box.
What about something like Puppy or DSL?
They aren't dedicated to programming, but they are small and lightweight.
I'd use something like GRML.
It really depends on what you are trying to do in terms of development.
Questions I would ask myself before development.
a) Who is the audience of the applications?
b) Is it a web based application or a desktop application?
c) How heavy is the number crunching part?
The first questions sometimes dictate the programming language you will be using. If it is for system administrator, I believe you will be writing a console application with command line interface, that the choice would be using programming language like shell scripts languages, C, C++, and a few other script languages like Python and Ruby.
For second question, If you are doing a web based application or mobile application, you would need to get the SDK with the libraries, and it would pretty much dictate the environment you will be working on.
For the number crunching part, you would need to look into libraries like CUDA or Fortran libraries that are designed for these type of applications.
Personally I use the Gentoo and Puppy Linux distro. If you need do C, Java and python, you could just download the stage3 tar ball of Gentoo linux, download the SDK from Oracle, and you are set to go.
Sometimes people want to do the developement in Windows environment, and don't want to miss the Unix tools, using cygwin and mingw in Windows environment would be viable options.
I recommend trisquel mini is the best which is also ubuntu based. I am using it.I installed eclipse ide in it with 1 gb ram. It uses only 200 mb for running os for more information visit my https://hassan004.blogspot.com/2022/01/weight-linux-distro-trisquel-mini.html
How to migrate to *nix platform after spending more than 10 years on windows? Which flavor will be easy to handle to make me more comfortable and then maybe I can switch over to more stadard *nix flavors?
I have been postponing for a while now. Help me with the extra push.
Linux is the most accessible and has the most mature desktop functionality. BSD (in its various flavours) has less userspace baggage and would be easier to understand at a fundamental level. In this regard it is more like a traditional Unix than a modern Linux distribution. Some might view this as a good thing (and from certain perspectives it is) but will be more alien to someone familiar with Windows.
The main desktop distributions are Ubuntu and Fedora. These are both capable systems but differ somewhat in their userspace architecture The tooling for the desktop environment and default configuration for system security works a bit differently on Ubuntu than it does on most other Linux or Unix flavours but this is of little relevance to development. From a user perspective either of these would be a good start.
From a the perspective of a developer, all modern flavours of Unix and Linux are very similar and share essentially the same developer tool chain. If you want to learn about the system from a programmer's perspective there is relatively little to choose.
Most unix programming can be accomplished quite effectively with a programmer's editor such as vim or emacs, both of which come in text mode and windowing flavours. These editors are very powerful and have rather quirky user interfaces - the user interfaces are ususual but contribute significantly to the power of the tools. If you are not comfortable with these tools, this posting discusses several other editors that offer a user experience closer to common Windows tooling.
There are several IDEs such as Eclipse that might be of more interest to someone coming off Windows/Visual Studio.
Some postings on Stackoverflow that discuss linux/unix resources are:
What are good linux-unix books for an advancing user
What are some good resources for learning C beyond K&R
Resources for learning C program design
If you have the time and want to do a real tour of the nuts and bolts Linux From Scratch is a tutorial that goes through building a linux installation by hand. This is quite a good way to learn in depth.
For programming, get a feel for C/unix from K&R and some of the resources mentioned in the questions linked above. The equivalent of Petzold, Prosise and Richter in the Unix world are W Richard Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment and Unix Network Programming vol. 1 and 2.
Learning one of the dynamic languages such as Perl or Python if you are not already familiar with these is also a useful thing to do. As a bonus you can get good Windows ports of both the above from Activestate which means that these skills are useful on both platforms.
If you're into C++ take a look at QT. This is arguably the best cross-platform GUI toolkit on the market and (again) has the benefit of a skill set and tool chain that is transferrable back into Windows. There are also several good books on the subject and (as a bonus) it also works well with Python.
Finally, Cygwin is a unix emulation layer that runs on Windows and gives substantially unix-like environment. Architecturally, Cygwin is a port of glibc and the crt (the GNU tool chain's base libraries) as an adaptor on top of Win32. This emulation layer makes it easy to port unix/linux apps onto Cygwin. The platform comes with a pretty complete set of software - essentially a full linux distribution hosted on a Windows kernel. It allows you to work in a unix-like way on Windows without having to maintain a separate operating system installations. If you don't want to run VMs, multiple boots or multiple PCs it may be a way of easing into unix.
Ubuntu is nicely balanced, with a user friendly desktop but the potential to set up a fully functional programming environment.
I would advise experimenting with virtual machines - there is no reason to ditch your current setup until you've tried a few of the major distributions. VMware and others have a wide variety of server and desktop builds available.
I guess it also depends on what programming languages your are comfortable with.
If you worked with C# in the past then you could look at using the knowledge by running Mono , or maybe look at using Java (which is syntactically very similar). Either way Linux would be good.
I personally would recommend you look at the Mac's OS X. Its a unix BSD based OS, but with a really slick user interface over the top. To me it feels like the best of both the Windows and Unix worlds.
I do all my unix development on it, deploying onto Ubuntu servers. If you do look at a Mac, definitely take a look at the MacPorts project, which packages a large amount of the open source unix/linux software up making installation of programming tools incredibly easy.
Ubuntu seems to be very user-friendly, and has a lot of specific information for it in forums etc. So support-wise you'll be covered.
I experienced the shift from windows to ubuntu as very much do-able, things you can do graphically in windows can be done exactly the same in ubuntu (maybe some exceptions) and a bit more. A computer savvy individual should not have any problems.
However, it helps greatly if you are familiar with the basic shell commands (you'll need them as a programmer!). Some are the same as on windows but especially ls (dir) sometimes has me wracking my brain for "what was that command again", and vice versa when I'm back on windows.
Take some time to try them out. (for example: pwd, ls, mv, rm, ps, kill)
Finally, when installing programs often a simple "sudo apt-get install X " does all the work for you, even more user friendly than the windows installer executables I find.
Edit: You might want to try a VMware player and try a few linux distributions to play around in before you install the dual boot.
Get a macbook pro. OSX is the smoothest flavour of unix and the laptop should give you the push you need.
Then when you're feeling more confident, you can decide whether or not you want to spend most of your time configuring your soundcard, running ./autoconfigure && make, and debugging package manager screwups.
Any modern version of Unix (or Linux) you can get running on your machine will be fine.
Here are the ones that I would consider:
Ubuntu. As others have noted, this is often considered to be the easiest to use. However some parts are not "standard" Unix. For example, the startup scripts do not use init. This is mostly a good thing, but if you're trying to learn Unix may not be what you need.
Fedora. Bleeding edge but with rough edges.
Slackware. Possibly the most Unix-like Linux distribution (some would say dated!).
One of the *BSDs: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD. Different approach to some things than Linux.
Solaris. This is "proper" Unix. Seems bare-bones compared with Linux but worth playing with to see what's "standard."
In fact, I would consider running at least a couple of them, most run fine as a VM. One of the good and bad things about Unix is that what's standardised is more the philosophy than many of the details. There's no Visual Studio, there's no C# (by that I mean no canonical high level language; I know about Mono).
Excellent answers. A few comments:
Almost all distros support LiveCDs, to let you try before installing. folks mentioned VMWare and VirtualBox, also note that Ubuntu's WUBI installer lets you install Linux under Windows without repartitioning; very nice; I used it when I first switched to my 64-bit system, since I wasn't sure how good the driver support was. Ubuntu 9.04 works great in 64, though. Also, since Ubuntu is so popular, that are many versions, Kubuntu uses KDE instead of Gnome, Mint and Xubuntu are both lighter weight.
Expect to run side-by-side for a while when transitioning from Windows. Cygwin has some nice downloadable manuals for people getting used to bash, and basic information about how *nix works underneath, targeted at Windows users. There are tons of useful sites; the Ubuntu community forums have a tremendous amount of information, for both beginners and advanced.
For getting used to developing under Linux, check the Linux documentation project. In addition to KDevelop, there's Anjuta, Eclipse, and many more. Some are light, some are heavyweight.
One thing that can ease the transition is to use software that runs in both operating systems. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Subversion, and hundreds if not thousands of others run fine in both Linux and Windows. And with very little effort, you can use the same folders for application settings and data for many of these. Firefox and Thunderbird can easily use the same folders/files on an NTFS partition. Makes dual booting much easier. Instructions are on the Ubuntu community site and other locations.
Note that some Linux software isn't NTFS friendly; in Linux keep your Subversion working folders on a native partition.
One caveat for sharing application settings; some applications store absolute paths; as a workaround, you can create symlinks that look like Windows drive letters.
After you get comfortable with Linux, branch out and try non-Windowsy applications and tools. Sometimes different is better. Lots of people use Emacs and Vim for good reasons.
Try Kubuntu as a distro and Kdevelop and Qt to start programming with, it's all very civilised.
Kate's an ok notepad-esque text editor if you want to go that way but I don't see why you'd want to get in to Vi or Emacs apart from the geeky appeal of using something really arcane.