Wednesday, April 05, 2006

A thing called CygWin

CygWin is a blessing to the windows operating systems. Basically it makes your Windows system acts like a UNIX OS. It provides some basic UNIX OS functionality together with programming development tools like GCC, etc. You could run xemacs/emacs on cygwin as well. So, if you are an emacs person and run windows on your PC (a rare combo) you should probably get CygWin.

CygWin also allows X11 forwarding through its CygWin/X package. So basically, you could connect to a remote linux/Unix server and get the graphical output on your WinOS. And fundamentally, Cygwin consists of a library that implements the POSIX system call API in terms of Win32 system calls.

I have been trying to setup CygWin/X. And today I got stuck trying to configure X11 forwarding and setting up display settings, although I had done it some time before. Basically you need to call the startwin.sh script, as described in here. After that you can ssh to your remote host on the X-window (window that appears after you run startwin.sh).

Tomorrow I get to meet Prof. Daniel. My ITK build is now completely messed up. I cleaned up the build and now after re-building it gives me errors which I never got before. I have written a basic visualization code. I also need to invest some time in getting my Adv. viz. coursework program code to work.

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