Hi,
I created a portable apps for Cygwin (cygwin.com). There is no installer at the moment, so you have to unzip it on your usb device. Your comments are welcome.
http://www.symbiosoft.net/cygwinportable
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Thank you for the link. Perhaps a better place for this post would be in the Beta forums, since you are offering a test version.
If I have some time, I will try your environment. How else is this different from the standard Cygwin which is usually installed in the root directory and started with a batch file?
The difference is that your environment follows you on your USB key, it is not confined to the hard drive. I think it could be useful to have a Unix-like environment when you have to work on computers where Cygwin is not installed or in paranoid companies where you can't install software on your PC Workstation if the CEO has not approve it... Believe me, such companies exist!
Etienne.
Etienne,
Sorry I wasn't clearer in my question. The standard version of Cygwin can be extracted in the root of a USB drive and run from there without registry entries being created. All created directories and files are placed under the installation directory. Basically, this means that Cygwin is natively portable. Is your work just a launcher or did you make changes to the application itself? What other changes have been made?
What is the main differences between an installation at the root of your usb device is:
- This comes with a portableapps launcher (and I`m working on a paf.exe installer also).
- I personnalized the Cygwin batch file according to this blog: http://blogs.linux.ie/fuzzbucket/2008/02/23/cygwin/ so you don`t have to change the drive letter if Windows decides that you usb drive is J: on one machine and Z: on the other.
I didn't change the Cygwin application itself. I know this is not much work but I hope it will be useful for someone using PortableApps launcher menu.
Thanks for your comments.
Etienne.
Thank you!
When i click on cygwin portable I get the setup start, and when I click on the setup option I get nothing!
Thanks for your feedback.
I will check that.
The launchers (one for Cygwin and the other for CygwinSetup) should work correctly now.
To try the new version 0.2, go to http://www.symbiosoft.net/cygwinportable to download the archive and unzip it under the PortableApps folder on your usb device.
Thanks for testing it!
Etienne.
i'm gonna do my best to make the installer (or only self-extracting 7z's exe) because it's my first one .
errr archive is broken?
Please try not to double post.
Thanks and welcome to Portable Apps!
What do you mean by "broken"?
I downloaded myself the 7z archive yesterday and decompressed it successfully...
Please could you elaborate more?
Thanks!
Etienne.
.zip archive is broken
Hi
The SourceForge have problem
Downloading from an diffrent mirror server.
I ran the portable version of Cygwin on a machine that had the normal Cygwin installed on it. The portable version changed the registry to point to the USB drive, making the regular version no longer run. I had to use regedit to recover my normal cygwin.
Hi rickh57,
I can see where cygwinPortable writes to the registry. I have had a look at launcher source and it could be fixed quite easily. It uses the app template script.
What I will do, later, is change it so that it backs up the machines registry, writes the portable registry and then when exited it will save the portable registry and write back the machines registry. (This is all done in Klonk's Application template script, which is used by esavard, it just seems that he missed the registry stuff).
Ps; esavard I hope you don't mind me modifying your launcher I will post the changes here so you can update your package to 0.3.
Rochey
Hi Rochey,
Your post was months ago but I take a chance to reply to you here...
I will be pleased if you can post the changes you have done to the launcher. I will update the package to 0.3.
You can post the code on sourceforge.net (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=230696&atid=1081281) or in the forum section on my website (http://symbiosoft.net/?q=forum/15).
Thanks!
Etienne.
Hi esavard,
I just starting using this portable cygwin. Thank you for doing it.
I think I've found a fault as when I run cygwinportable rxvt doesn't show the login info (user@machine in green). what I've changed is:
"%WD%\bin\run %WD%\bin\rxvt.exe -sl 1500 -fn "Lucida Console-12" -bg black -fg grey -sr -e BASH.EXE --login -i"
On your version you had "%WD%\bin\bash" which didn't seem to do anything.
Another thing when I run cygwinportable it says
"Your group is currently "mkpasswd". This indicates that
the /etc/passwd (and possibly /etc/group) files should be rebuilt.
See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for example, run
mkpasswd -l [-d] > /etc/passwd
mkgroup -l [-d] > /etc/group
Note that the -d switch is necessary for domain users."
Is there anyway of fixing this?
Thanks again.
Rochey
sorry but i got it but how do i set it up
"It's just an online installer. It's not going to mug you.", JTH
"The shell is the key to unlock Linux's greatest advantages."
If you download 0.2 from the above link (I used the 7zip download). Then extract it to your portable apps directory and then refresh your portable apps menu, you are then good to go.
You should see in your PA menu CygwinPortable and CygwinPortable Setup. Forget the setup option for now as the basic cygwin environment is already in the download.
If you now run CygwinPortable a dos style window should open with a prompt line and you are ready to go.
Hope this helps. (you might need to make a change in the cygwin.bat file as I stated above but just try what I said in this reply first to see if it works)
Also I just tried running my cygwin from a Workgroup pc and a domain Pc. When I run it from a workgroup pc I don't get the problem about the mkpasswd group but I do get it from the domain Pc.
Any ideas? Anyone?
Rochey
one more question how can i get a windows manager on it and will it mess windows up at all
Thanks
Andrew
"It's just an online installer. It's not going to mug you.", JTH
"The shell is the key to unlock Linux's greatest advantages."
I'm not sure what you mean by a windows manager but I think you are talking about a gui for the cygwin environment (a front end that shows icons and a taskbar etc). I have not installed one for myself but I think you can install something like X11. You will have to have a search on google for this. Any instructions you find will probably tell you to run Cygwin Setup and install some packages, just use the Cygwin Portable Setup. Sorry I can't be more helpful.
Regarding Windows and whether it will mess it up; the only thing that I know changes are a few environment variables are added when CygwinPortable is started, but these are just temporary variables and are only used by Cygwin for the duration that cygwinportable is open for.
Hope this helps.
Rochey
hi, etienne,
thanks for portable cygwin. i've installed cygwinportable on a usb thumbdrive; and i've launched it successfully on an xp box in a student computer lab. however, when i try to launch it on any vista box in the same computer lab, vista complains that "an unidentified program wants access to your computer" and prompts me for an administrator password to continue. (the portableapps.com platform launches fine on vista; it's from there i try to launch cygwinportable)
any idea what's going on or any remediation steps i can take? is there any further info i can give you to help understand the issue?
thanks,
james
Yea I have the same problem, although it is my home pc. It still wants to try and run in administrator mode which is bad for cygwin.
The whole reason I made user accounts was A: extra defense and B: So cygwin would work properly.
Cygwin does not run well on administrator mode. All the ~/home/rc files do not execute while in admin mode, I have found that usually running cygwin as a user fixes this problem. However being that the portable wants to run in admin mode, it is not updating mkpasswd, or w/e creating user accounts automatically.
I'm also wondering if perhaps a pseudo-user could be set up perhaps a ~/home/pseudo_root that works on all systems regardless of admin mode or user mode.
I don't think i worded that well, but what I mean is set up a generic user pre-unzip that will work for everyone who downloads?
Hi,
The Portable Cygwin you mentioned in this post (years ago now) appears to have been abandoned. No updates have been made since 2009, but the Cygwin codebase has been updating steadily in the meantime.
I propose we bring this project back to life! I took the liberty of creating a .paf.exe installer out of the zip you published on SourceForge, and created a temporary home for Cygwin Portable on my website: http://www.miketurley.com/cygwinportable.
Feel free to reclaim this project and I'll take down my page. However if it is truly abandoned, I'm willing to take over.
-Mike
Why don't you make a new thread and format it the way that the other beta app threads are formatted? It'd be nice to start anew, since it'll be a new dev with an essentially-new app.
Looking forward to seeing this develop!
SWAG
Can you make cygwin work with portable eclipse?
Can you make it at portableapps\commonfile\cygwin?
https://portableapps.com/node/28647
Thank you for your work.
Tal.
After quite a bit of research and experimentation I've found that recent versions of cygwin are almost portable out of the box. Here is what I did to get cygwin working on my thumbdrive: http://fadedbluesky.com/2011/portable-cygwin/
Hi,
I know the most last post here is ages old, but could someone please post the howto for installing cygwin from scratch on a thumb drive. Unfortunately, the link above doesn't work anymore.
Thanks
Z.
Just go to http://fadedbluesky.com/ both posts are somewhere down there.