ObLRPD: Laugh self to death
...and I was shot in a principal's office last week too...
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Interestingly, I just got done posting the following to another\r\nsite:
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\r\nCygwin's generally one of the first things I toss onto a legacy MS\r\nWindows box if I'm unfortunate enough to be stuck with one. It's hardly\r\na replacement for a full GNU/Linux box (or your preferred 'Nix flavor)\r\nthough.
\r\n\r\nThere are an impressive number of ported apps. The shell tools are\r\npretty darned good. And you can launch MS Windows apps from Cygwin\r\n(particularly useful with shell tools and such), deal with pathnames\r\n(usually), and other hacks.
\r\n\r\nThe GUI environments are limited though. There's twm by default, and\r\nWindowMaker (though few of the dock apps), and KDE. Last I checked,\r\nGNOME wasn't ported (though you can always run it remotely using Cygwin\r\nto provide an X terminal server). And most of the powerful Nix desktop\r\napps aren't there. There are of course Win32 ports of many of these:\r\nMozilla, Gimp, OpenOffice.org, XEmacs, to name a few. But then you're\r\nstuck with two windowing environments. Too: legacy MS Windows steals\r\nkeybindings you may prefer to have used under X. Full-screen X11 cycles\r\nrather disconcertingly with other MS Windows apps.
\r\n\r\nOther issues: print support is limited, Cygwin isn't large-file clean,\r\nthere are a lack of utilities for dealing with postscript file formats\r\n(or converting them, e.g.: psnup, a2ps). The lack of a real Unix at or\r\ncron schedular is a major pain, as is the lack of access to the MS\r\nWindows process space via tools such as 'ps' and 'top'. Look to other\r\ntoolkits, notably UWIN (from AT&T Research) which provide more complete\r\nfunctionality here. And note that all these criticisms are current as of\r\nMarch, 2003, but may have changed by the time you read this.
\r\n\r\nDon't get me wrong: I consider Cygwin an essential tool for those\r\nstranded on the legacy MS Windows wasteland. Cygwin's made incredible\r\nprogress over the years (I've used it since 1997). And the pace of\r\ndevelopment continues to be impressive. Just don't expect it to be a\r\nfull replacement.
\r\n\r\nMy preferred solution is to pick up an inexpensive box ($200 and up),\r\ntoss GNU/Linux on that, and access 'Doze, when necessary, remotely via\r\nTightVNC.
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