Uber Geek Question: Anybody know about CYGWIN and/or Mono/.NET?

Wrecked944 · 10-21-2006, 09:43 AM

I know...this one is really geeky...I should be putting my pointy ears on just to type it out...but I am trying to use an open source .NET platform called Mono to compile some C# code (long story) and I am being told I need something called CYGWIN. So okay, I installed this CYGWIN thingy but I have no idea how to use it. Has anybody heard of any of this stuff and can anyone offer even a few clues?

BlueSkyJaunte · 10-21-2006, 10:30 AM

I could've told you three years ago but my Mac fetish has rotted my brain.

IIRC Cygwin is basically a "unix-like" userland for Windoze. Right? You probably have a bash shell in there as well as all of the usual command line utilities. Isn't there a Cygwin website?

BlueSkyJaunte · 10-21-2006, 10:31 AM

Lo and behold...

http://www.cygwin.com/

Sorry to basically hit you with an "RTFM" but it's been years since I dealt with this.

JavaBrewer · JavaBrewer's Garage

Quote:

Originally posted by BlueSkyJaunte
IIRC Cygwin is basically a "unix-like" userland for Windoze. Right? You probably have a bash shell in there as well as all of the usual command line utilities. Isn't there a Cygwin website?

Correct. Great for us old developers who learned on unix machines. I still do most of my dev work with command line tools and admittedly prefer VIM over Eclipse...

Wrecked944 · 10-21-2006, 10:53 AM

Well, I did RTFM and it still isn't clear to me what I am supposed to be doing. I have played with the CYGWIN shell and yet the mono documents all refer to using the mono command line. Oddly enough, as far as I can tell, I need to use the mono command line to run the mono stuff but I need to run it from the CYGWIN shell to incorporate the CYGWIN stuff...see my problem?

So I am assuming I have simply misunderstood the whole thing from the get go. And now I am so freaking baffled I have no clue what to do...It just can't be as complicated as it appears to me. So I have to think *somebody* understands this better than me.

id10t · 10-21-2006, 12:53 PM

cygwin is a *nix "emulator" under windows, sorta like wine translates windows calls to native linux calls.

Be easier to setup vmware (its free now) or just dual boot.

Wrecked944 · 10-21-2006, 02:30 PM

Hey, thanks for the help...it turns out id10t was probably correct. It would have been easier to dual boot! After beating my head against the wall I found that my initial perception was strangely correct. The CYGWIN shell does not play very well with mono and the workarounds are NOT very well documented (and that's being kind). Anyway, it turned out I needed to track down a mono config file and then set a CYGWIN path to locate it. Oh yeah, of course, how could I have missed such an obvious solution?

CYGWIN seems able to find everything *else* in mono except the config file. Nice. That's about ten hours wasted.

Anyway, it "compiles" now...the "compiled" exe doesn't actually *do* anything yet...but I'm sure after a few more days of suffering I'll find another undocumented fix for that problem...

I'm not complaining really. This is pretty much SOP in the open source software world.

id10t · 10-21-2006, 02:51 PM

Yeah, while I am a big OS proponent (anyone want a debian or ubuntu install cd?) my biggest complaint is the lack of documentation, or old outdated documentation, etc.

mikester · 10-21-2006, 03:00 PM

Cygwin is convienent but not perfect. VMware can be slow on your desktop or laptop where as Cygwin is comparitively speedy (though not as fast as native *nix).

I use it on a daily basis on my XP laptop at work. It's easier for me to do some things with it. Typically though it doesn't play nice with lots of things.

id10t · 10-21-2006, 03:10 PM

Not sure about vmware being slow - I only run it on my dual cpu box... so effectively it has a whole cpu to itself.