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Re: Installing cygwin NOT from web


Daniel,

At 07:54 2003-03-19, Daniel Barclay wrote:
Max Bowsher wrote:
Charles D. Russell wrote:
...
1) setup.exe is really designed to work best for direct installation
from the web, so do that first on some computer with an internet
connection. 2) when you install from the web, copies of all the
downloaded files - including setup.exe - are retained in a directory
that you can specify. After completing the installation, if you burn
that directory to a CD, you have everything you need to reinstall to
that or another computer.
...

Mostly right - but there is no need to actually install Cygwin on your downloading computer.

But why do you have to be running Windows to _download_ CygWin?


Why can't you download the files using any FTP/HTTP client and operating
system you want, transfer the files (or otherwise make them visible) to a
Windows system, and only then use setup.exe to install the files from the
Windows-visible directory?

This is quite feasible, but a simple local mirror of the Cygwin distribution or any valid subset thereof (itself obtained from one of the public mirror sites, of course) will not be suitable for use by Setup.exe. There needs to be a renaming applied between the mirror host and the local mirror.


Search the Cygwin archives for the subject "setup.exe joblist for downloading" for a simpleminded script, "mkcygwget," that will produce a comprehensive (*) wget script. Look also for messages that mention "clean_setup.pl" for a more sophisticated alternative.

(*) Comprehensive here is not a good thing. It will download every package (current, previous and experimental, if they exist) including its source, if any. This is almost always insufficiently selective. Refinement is left as an exercise for the motivated. If you do enhance, it, I'd appreciate your sharing it with me (I wrote mkcygwget) and the rest of us.

Both of these scripts require more than Windows (BASH or Perl, resp., at the very minimum) but should be useful (possibly requiring modification) on a Unix system.


One might want to download once to a local mirror and then install on
multiple machines.

Commonly done.


Still, Setup.exe is the best (certainly the easiest) way to acquire the local mirror from which you'll install (via local network share or a CD burned from what Setup.exe downloads).


In my case,  I dual-boot Linux and Windows, running Linux most of the time,
and have a slow network connection.  I would want to download to a local
mirror in the background (while doing whatever else I'm doing while booted
in Linux), and then boot into Windows to install.

If you're in the money, consider VMware (more than 512 MB RAM suggested and single-user non-educational licenses cost $300).



Organizations that provide network installers usually also provide separately
downloadable versions (witness Netscape, Mozilla (I think), Microsoft Windows
service packs, Debian GNU/Linux).  Could Cygwin follow suit sometime?

If you mean will the Cygwin team produce monolithic installers, that's very unlikely. The package set changes far too often to keep creating unified release packages each of which would be is the a half gigabyte in size.


The analogy with your examples is poor, since they are mostly smaller (Mozilla) and uniformly less frequently updated. Even if you consider a Linux distribution, it, too, does not produce full releases when individual packages within it are updated.

But if you want to create such a thing, you could do so. Pick your favorite language (C / C++, shell, Perl, Python, Java are all viable candidates) and start writing. I'm being glib, of course, but then again as the aforementioned BASH and Perl scripts show, it's not that hard, either.


Daniel


Randall Schulz


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