Cygwin Installation

This page covers the installation of Cygwin on MS Windows:

Downloading
Installing
Verifying

Cygwin is based at www.cygwin.com. They have an installer that is relatively easy to use.

Downloading

First you need to download the setup program. You can go to www.cygwin.com and press on the icon that says "Install Cygwin now", or you can press on the icon at the left.

You will have to save the setup program somewhere on your computer. Make sure to save it in a folder/directory that you can easily find.

Installing

Find wherever you saved the cygwin setup program and run it.

The setup program itself will guide you through most of the setup and is mostly self-explanatory:

Cygwin Net Release Setup Program: No choices to make. Just press Next
Choose a Download Source: Easiest is just to Install from Internet which is the default.
Select Root Install Directory: Default settings work fine. You can change the Root Directory if you want.
Select Local Package Directory: Default settings work fine. You can change the Local Package Directory if you want.
Select your Internet Connection: You should be able to use the default Direct Connection unless you are behind a firewall.
Progress: Wait while the setup program downloads a list of mirror sites for Cygwin.
Choose Download Site(s): This lets you pick a site from the list. The one to pick depends on where you are installing from. Try selecting a site that ends in "edu" such as ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu
Progress: Wait while the setup program downloads a list of available Cygwin packages from the mirror sites that you selected.
Select Packages: For now install the default packages. You can run setup again to get other packages.
Progress: You can now sit back and wait while the packages that are going to be installed are downloaded and then installed.
Create Icons: Well the downloading is finally over. I would have the setup program both Create icon on Desktop and Add icon to Start Menu. You can always remove them later. Now all you have to do is press the Finish button.

The setup program will popup a shell window that will run for a minute and then a dialog box will popup telling you that the setup is complete.

Verifying

The Cygwin icon on the desktop will startup a cygwin shell. Double-click the icon and you should see a shell with a dollar sign prompt.

Type a simple command such as ls --help (two dashes) in the cygwin shell and press the return key. You should see a bunch of text describing all the options to the ls command.

At this point you know that Cygwin was successfully installed. Now you can install the additional packages that you want.