Cygwin

What works

Installing with the default package list works well, printing a few Wine FIXMEs in the console, but without giving any errors. The table on the screen where you select packages is too small and cannot be resized (bug 12104) so it's a bit awkward to use, but functional.

Once installed, it has to be run via "wineconsole ./bash.exe" from C:\cygwin\bin. No other way of starting it works. In that window, commands can be run, both bash builtins and other Cygwin tools, you can pipe and redirect their output, get and set environment variables, and so on. Thus a minimally functional command line shell works. As for the hundreds of packages Cygwin has, these will vary on a case-by-case basis.

What does not

Many other ways of starting Cygwin (stty.exe, grotty.exe, tty.exe) fail, with some fork() or memory error, and/or this printed in the console output:

0120:fixme:console:console_input_ioctl unsupported ioctl 504088

There is no scrollback in the "wineconsole bash" window.

The default bash.exe PATH excludes /usr/bin, so you have to use paths in your commands, eg. "./ls" or "/usr/bin/ls" instead of just "ls".

Many package-specific bugs are likely to exist, eg. "ln -s directory link" creates some kind of link file, but you cannot "cd link" into it.

Workarounds

It helps to:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin

What was not tested

Cygwin is vast and there are far too many packages to test them all.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

It is promising that we seem to finally have the current Cygwin version working at a minimally functional level, but much more testing and debugging will be required to get everything working well.