Intro:

Yes, I’m a sucker for Cygwin. Being “forced” to live inside a few windows boxes on the corporate world made me embrace this tool to escape from a few nazi-ish policies and improve my efficiency when faced with common (and then again, maybe not) tasks.

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:

• A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.

• A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.

The Cygwin DLL currently works with all recent, commercially released x86 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows, with the exception of Windows CE.

Think of it as an advanced Command Prompt for Windows boxes. Developing, debugging,scripting, testing, hacking. All of this can be done inside a Cygwin window  – just be aware that the standard Cygwin shortcut will just launch a cmd.exe window with a bash shell on it – for added usefulness, it’s much more efficient to launch it using the following shortcut:

C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -fn "Lucida Console-11" -bg black
-fg white -ls -st -sr -sl 1500 -C  -e /usr/bin/bash --login

Cygwin packages, the debian way:

Getting a new Cygwin installation running is usually a painful experience for several reasons:

1. As far as I know there is no way to script a complete installation using the setup utility.

2. Selecting packages for installation is a pain in the ass since the setup utility looks like it’s been designed by a monkey.

3. When an error occurs on installation, chances are your package selection is probably gone.

Truth be told, major revamping on the setup utility has been done on the past few months. It is now possible to search for an individual package by name. Searching for a package that provides a given binary/file/whatever is still very hard to accomplish and/or quite unclear.

However, I’ve come across an interesting project (one year old, as we speak) that brings the familiar Debian apt-get family commands to install packages. I’d think about this as a way to jumpstart a Cygwin installation, but it requires bash, wget, tar, gawk and bzip2 to be installed beforehand (and these should be installed on a zero configuration setup run)

Its name is apt-cyg. “a command-line installer for Cygwin which cooperates with Cygwin Setup and uses the same repository. The syntax is based on apt-get but simplified.”

With it, installing a full fledged and customized Cygwin setup is just a matter of running setup.exe once, installing the script using the suggested invocation and launching a preexisting shell script which all it does is installing the remaining packages (and dependencies) in one step.

So, back to Ubuntu Dapper Drake. It seems that both Edgy, Feisty and all other distros featuring the latest crappy Xorg server don’t play along with the louzy videocard bundled with my laptop. Not even when I use a Dapper working xorg.conf. To hell with it. At least while I don’t get a new laptop.

Learning from previous instalations, all things went smooth, except when I had to install a Citrix client. ICA Client version 10.0 requires Openmotif and there were no sources in sight with the appropriate package. But the package exists in Ubuntu’s package listings. Next step would be obviously installing the client, just to notice it just won’t run with the following error:


Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset
Error: Aborting: no fontset found


a quick peek at the support forum pointed me to the need of performing a


xset fp rehash


everytime and before wfica or wfcmgr are run. It also looks like there are a lot of other common problems known to exist with. Here’s a link to a page with some information on these Citrix ICA client issues (out of which this script is a real winner, as it will patch and configure permanently almost every aspect of this application – it’s designed for Ubuntu 6.10 and later, but nothing a little hack won’t fix).

(Then there’s also a Slashdot article about Microsoft Looking to Run Windows on OLPC. Don’t the poor children of the world suffer enough?)

Suddenly, it feels like someone is opening a huuuge Pandora’s box. There are movies (and TV series) which feel a whole lot more real than PotC2 which:
a) take place in somewhere which is probably already mapped by Google.
b) probably have a zillion viewers and fans which are experienced Google Earth users and would love to know a little more about the show (yes, I would love to see Lost trying something like this).
c) could use an extra dose of marketing share and buzz factor.The truth is building solutions on top of Google Earth is easier than spelling Supercalifragalisticexpialidocious. Real time interaction and dynamic behaviour can be achieved by server side components located anywhere (not necessarily Google).
I think we may be seeing something along these lines in the near future…

There was a time where Microsoft was known for buying small startups that looked like some kind of threat or offered software pieces tightly binded to Windows (and most of all, popular) so that these could slowly be bundled with their software. Most of these software solutions ended up in oblivion or squashed in the process of building “better, faster and secure” applications (and I’m quoting). I just hope these guys have better luck today and achieve what they’re looking for, “making Windows an even better platform for all of us”. We all know what they’re capable of…
Go grab your copies of TCPView, Filemon, Regmon and Process Explorer while you can and save them to your USB pendrives. These utilities are priceless, a must have for every sysadmin and should have been part of the operating system from the dawn of ages.

(If you’re feeling in the mood for a practical joke, replace some default screensavers for BlueScreen too…)