Downloading and Installing cygwin

Cygwin is a free unix-a-like for Windows. You can download it from www.cygwin.com.

If you are using the old B20 version I would highly recommend upgrading.

Choose to install all options, unless you know you don't need them. In particular, the OPENGL includes are essential for Maverik, and the image format libraries JPEG, PNG and TIFF are very useful.

This is how I setup my environment:

Install cygwin

Run setup.exe, choosing where to install to (I used the default c:\cygwin). Select Programs->Cygnus Solutions->Cygwin bash shell from the start menu to get a bash shell in a dos window. Then do the following:

Mount filesystems
mount -b a: /a
mount -b c: /c
mount -b d: /d
mount -b e: /cdrom

You can choose whether to mount drives as I have. You will get warnings about non-existent files unless you mkdir each mount point first. The mount will still work. Use mount with no options to see the currently mounted filesystems. The -b option tells cygwin to mount the filesystem in binary mode. I use binary mode across all filesystems, so I have to use a unix-compatible text editor such as vim or emacs.

Set up directories

Cygwin has a much better default setup than in the past, so you don't need to create any system directories.

mkdir -p /home/keatesm

Obviously, you should replace keatesm with your user name.

Create a batch file

Using wordpad, create a .bat file for starting cygwin:

@ECHO OFF
SET MAKE_MODE=UNIX
SET PATH=C:\CYGWIN\BIN;%PATH%
SET HOME=C:\CYGWIN\HOME\KEATESM
SET CYGWIN=tty binmode
CD %HOME%
bash

This will start bash in your home directory (assuming you change the keatesm).

Create a .bashrc in /home/keatesm

Using vi or another unix-compatible editor, create a .bashrc in your home directory:

export TMP=/tmp
export HOME=/home/keatesm
export PATH=.:~/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH
export TERMCAP=/etc/termcap
export TERM=linux
export PS1='`hostname`: '
export HISTSIZE=32
export MAV_HOME=/home/keatesm/Maverik
alias h=history
alias more=less
alias ls='ls -F'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias which=type
cd

MAV_HOME is where Maverik is (or will be) installed.

And that's about it!

Some possible problems

If you get an "out of environment space" error try adding

shell=C:\command.com /e:4096 /p

to config.sys

If you get a couple of "command not found" errors and a corrupt prompt at startup then your .bashrc is probably in windows text format. Make sure your editor is in unix format when creating text files. If you are using vim then add the following to ~/_vimrc (create it if it doesn't exist):

se fileformats=unix,dos
se fileformat=unix

If you get link errors for windows functions then make sure you are not using the -ansi option to gcc (for the code which makes the windows calls).