The View from the Other Side - Software Review - Evaluation

ENT, Dec 13, 2000 by Stephen Swoyer

One of our principal beefs with Microsoft's Windows Services for Unix 2.0 is that it is designed primarily to make Unix systems easier to manage from Windows environments. In practice, however, a lot of Unix administrators are looking for a suite of tools that can help them manage their Windows systems from the familiarity of Unix environments. Windows Services for Unix 2.0 doesn't help them much.

With this in mind, we took a look at version 1.1.x of Cygwin, a development environment and suite of interoperability tools available -- as a free download -- from Cygnus Solutions, a subsidiary of Linux vendor Red Hat Inc.

Cygwin provides a feature-complete port of the open source GNU development tools and administrative utilities for Windows 9x, Windows ME, and Windows NT/2000. Parts of it are covered under the open source GNU public license, which means you cannot only modify it to your heart's content, but you can also incorporate the modifications of others if and when they're made available.

Make sure that you check out the licensing terms on Cygwin's Web site (www.cygwin.com/licensing.html) to find out what you can and can't do to the code.

The Big Test

We installed Cygwin on an AMD Athlon 600-MHz system with 256 MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Service Pack 1 (SP1) installed. Our lab environment consisted of Windows NT 4.0 client machines; a Windows NT 4.0 Server with SP5 running Oracle8; a Sun Solaris box running Netscape Enterprise Server 3.0; and six Debian Linux servers handling tasks ranging in scope from simple Web serving, to firewall and IP masquerading, to DNS.

Cygwin includes a GNU C compiler (GCC) as well as a full set of development tools, such as for bug checking and code optimization. The GCC compiler and the libraries -- functions that a program can call that are standardized so you know what to expect -- are becoming a standard across all flavors of Unix, and now on Windows.

In contrast to Microsoft's Windows Services for Unix 2.0 -- which installs icons and folders in the Start Menu -- CygWin installs only a single icon. We think administrators from Unix backgrounds will be most at home with this approach: Double clicking on the Cygwin icon drops you into a bash shell prompt and, voila, you're in a fake root -- file system root, that is -- environment.

To get the GNU tools to work right, programs expect a certain file system structure. The highest we could go in the directory tree from a bash prompt is the c:\program files\cygwin directory.

We could, however, mount the "C:\" drive in our test box in the "/" root directory. Once you re used to it, it's exactly how Unix works: StarOffice, for example, lives in/opt/Office51; Perl can live in /usr/share/bin/ -- just as they do on Unix platforms. We could even access Windows applications by using Unix syntax to navigate to /c/Program\Files/winzip/winzip.exe, for example, to launch the Winzip file compression program.

Cygwin doesn't include a Perl implementation, but there are open source Perl implementations for Win32 available from other sources, as well as from Microsoft, which ships such an implementation with its Windows Services for Unix 2.0 interoperability toolset.

Cygwin includes a port of VIM -- an improved version of the legendary Visual Interface (VI) editor -- which we feel is a good thing. VIM adds many features to VI, such as syntax highlighting, and is bundled with several Unix platforms.

Cygwin has a few "gotchas" in store for programmers -- such as the fact that it isn't really case-sensitive. It also includes a secure shell (ssh) client, but no ssh daemon. Most security conscious systems administrators prefer ssh as a secure alternative to Telnet.

We really can't, say enough about Cygwin's ports of the GNU utilities. They are exactly what you would get on a Unix box -- with the obvious exception of features such as Unix-flavored multitasking -- that are impossible to reduplicate in Windows environments. And Cygwin isn't a development-only tool. It seems really useful for administrative tasks.

Conclusion

Cygwin should best be positioned as a complement to Microsoft's. Windows Services for Unix 2.0. It picks up Windows Services for Unix in areas that it lacks -- particularly where the Unix administrator is involved.

In our opinion, Cygwin provides the kind of functional Unix environment that is missing from the Microsoft offering. With Windows Services for Unix 2.0's NFS/NIS support and Cygwin's powerful Unix command environment, administrators in mixed environments now have a powerful joint solution.

Cygwin

Cygnus Solutions, Sunnyvale, Calif.

www.cygwin.com

Price: Free download

Pros/Cons:

* fl powerful interoperability tool for administrators with mixed Windows and Unix systems

* Provides a near-perfect Unix command-line environment on Windows platforms

* Can facilitate the porting of existing Unix applications or the development of cross-platform applications for Unix and Windows.

- Doesn't ship with an ssh daemon