Cygwin

Cygwin is a collection of various Unix tools, GNU development environments, and application softwares ported to Windows. It works on Windows XP and Vista. It includes C/C++ compilers, make, etc. In this section a process of installing Cygwin and sevaral required tools to Windows Vista. Download the Cygwin setup.exe from
http://www.cygwin.com/
on somewhere, say, on the desktop, and double click the icon, then, you have

Click the "Next" button. You will have the following window:

Again, click "Next" button to have a window for which you can select the root directory of Cygwin, as follows:

If you select "C:¥cygwin" as the root directory, all the files are installed under this directory. Click "Next" button.

Click "Next" button to have a window in which you find internet connection selection.

If your PC is connected directly to the internet, click "Next".

Choose an appropriate download site from the list and click "Next". A lot of packages will be found in the window. Each package category is expanded or closed by clicking + and - icon.

"Skip" in the list means that the package is not installed. If it is to be installed, click "Skip". Make sure that the following packages are selected.

Note that some of the related and required packages are automatically selected.

"gnu-plot" might be selected because it is useful for making various kinds of graphs and diagrams. But "lapack", a famous linear algebra package, should not be selected. If it is needed, it can be installed from the source files place on the site "Netlib".

 

After all the required packages are selected, click "Next" again.

After the packages are successfully installed, the setup program asks whether the shortcut icon should be created on the desktop and the icon be added in the startup menu, or not. Click "Finished" to complete the installation.

Check the desktop to find the shortcut to the "Cygwin" application.

Click the icon of "Cygwin", next terminal window starts. You can type commands directly from this window to use cygwin tools.