To answer the second part of the question: No, you, you don't need Cygwin or MinGW to build or to run XEmacs. But if you have them and want to use them, XEmacs supports these environments. One important reason to support Cygwin is that it lets the MS Windows developers test out their code in a Unix environment without actually having to have a Unix machine around. For this reason alone, Cygwin support is likely to remain supported for a long time in XEmacs.

For those who would like to use the Cygwin environment for development, yet generate non-Cygwin-dependant executables, a much easier option to "-mno-cygwin" does exist. Simply install Cygwin and the MinGW distribution in seperate directories (i.e. "C:\CYGWIN" and "C:\MINGW"), and make sure that the "/bin" subdirectory beneath your MinGW installation comes before Cygwin's "/bin" subdirectory in your PATH environment variable (i.e. "PATH=%PATH%;C:\MINGW\BIN;C:\CYGWIN\BIN").

Yes. Hanzac has provided support for using MinGW to compile the FD32 kernel and drivers under a Windows platform. Although it should work, we have not tried to compile FreeDOS-32 with Cygwin: please let us know if Cygwin is working for you. [Contents]

MinGW ("Minimalistic GNU for Windows") refers to a set of runtime headers, used in building a compiler system based on the GNU GCC and binutils projects. It compiles and links code to be run on Win32 platforms... providing C, C++ and Fortran compilers plus other related tools. If you see references to "mingw32" instead of "MinGW", they are referring to the same compiler system.

No. The name XEmacs is unfortunate in the sense that it is not an X Window System-only version of Emacs. XEmacs has full color support on a color-capable character terminal.

Strictly speaking, no. XEmacs will build and install just fine without any packages installed. However, only the most basic editing functions will be available with no packages installed, so installing packages is an essential part of making your installed XEmacs _useful_.

Cygwin/X supports Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 as of 2003-12-29. Cygwin/X requires Cygwin to compile and run. Cygwin is not, as of 2003-12-29, available on Microsoft Windows CE, therefore Cygwin/X is not currently available on Microsoft Windows CE.

Cygwin tools are, in the words of the Cygwin homepage, "ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows 95, 98, and NT. They function by using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API." Cygwin provides the compiler (gcc), libraries, headers, and other utilities which build and support the operation of Cygwin/X.

You can't use the same copy of Gnus in both as the Lisp files are byte-compiled to a format which is different depending on which Emacs did the compilation. Get one copy of Gnus for Emacs and one for XEmacs.

When Colin Peters released the MinGW runtime he placed the source into the public domain. No one owns a copyright (C) to the source because of this. You as a software manufacturer are free to use the MinGW runtime in your proprietary and OpenSource software as you see fit. The only thing you can't do is to claim ownership of the source and use Colin Peters' name, the MinGW name or the name of any of it's contributors in endorsement of any product.

The current version of BENV does not support from working within the CYGWIN or MSYS environments. The problem is how these environments handle the file system root/C drive issue. BENV support for CYGWIN and MSYS is planned, but has not yet been completed.

Be sure that your build directory is mounted such that it has the same path either as a cygwin path ('/build/xemacs') or as a Windows path ('c:\build\xemacs'). Specify the target location of the extra libs on the command line to 'configure', e.g.for 21.4 or earlier './configure --site-prefixes=/build/libs i586-pc-mingw32' and for 21.5 or later './configure --with-site-prefixes=/build/libs i586-pc-mingw32'.

Py-OEChem is not available for use with the Python bundled with CYGWIN. However, by installing "Python for windows" from python.org and running that executable (normally /cygdrive/c/python23/python.exe) then Py-OEChem scripts may be run from CYGWIN. The one caveat is that absolute file pathnames must be specified in DOS format -- with backslashes, etc. -- though relative pathnames can be in CYGWIN/UNIX format.

It's easy to configure an MSYS environment for MinGW useage, since there is no overlap in functionality to contend with (as there is with Cygwin). Simply decompress the contents of each archive into directories of your choosing, and add the MinGW "/bin" subdirectory to your PATH (either within MSYS's " /etc/profile" or in your overall system PATH). There is no need to add MSYS's "/bin" to your system PATH.

HDF5 has been built successfully on cygwin. In HDF5 1.8, Fortran libraries are also supported. However, building shared libraries is not. Please see the details in the document INSTALL_Cygwin.txt on how to build and test HDF5 with cygwin.

Download and install MGLTools for Windows; double-click on AutoDockTools icon to make sure that everything is installed and working. Start Cygwin and run the following command: /cygdrive/c/Python24/python.exe c:"\Program Files\MGLTools 1.4.5\MGLToolsPckgs\AutoDockTools\bin\runAdt.py"

For a concise description of the current situation with XEmacs, see this message from the Cygwin mailing list: 'http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-11/msg00609.html'.

XEmacs is regularly tested on Linux, Solaris, SunOS, HP/UX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS aka BSDI, Tru64 aka DEC/OSF, SCO5, and probably others. It should work on all versions of Unix created in the last 10 years or so, perhaps with a bit of work on more obscure platforms to correct bit-rot.

Assume we have a testdll.h, testdll.c, and testmain.c. In the first case, we will compile testdll.c with MinGW, and let the MSVC-compiled testmain call it. You should use gcc -shared -o testdll.dll testdll.c \ to produce the DLL and DEF files. MSVC cannot use the MinGW library, but since you have already the DEF file you may easily produce one by the Microsoft LIB tool: lib /machine:i386 /def:testdll.def Once you have testdll.lib, it is trivial to produce the executable with MSVC: cl testmain.

Answer: Cygwin utilities (www.cygwin.com) are not certified to run K2 tools. There are no plans to certify K2 with these utilities, and problems will not be investigated. If similar problems occur with a native Windows Command window, they will be investigated; but a Cygwin-specific fix will not be released. ----possible symptoms---- One problem specific to Cygwin utilities has been reported: When starting an rcadmin session using a Cygwin window, the program stops responding.

This is due to a conflict between Cygwin's DLLs and QT's DLLs. Make sure you are using the most recent release of the QT files from the download area. Another possibility is to use the DLL rebase utility from the kde-cygwin download area to avoid such collisions. See below for examples: