# cygwin [resolved]

## earl_dc10

Im looking at using cygwin on my family's windows computer to link up to my gentoo box. I've read up on cygwin but they never really say if it has any noticable effect on how windows operates. Sometimes they make it sound like it's just a background program and other times it seems as if it alters the entire system. They would hate me forever if for some reason something went wrong..... anyways, just wondering if anyone has any insight on it.

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## frostschutz

I use Cygwin to run some unixoid programs (or rather, services) on a windows machine. It will run in windows just like any other windows app. I've never messed with Cygwin's X11 support, though. The normal plain Cygwin will just give you a command prompt window with a Bash shell in it instead of a C:\ command prompt.

If all you need is a SSH client though, you'd probably rather go with PuTTY or whatever. Using Cygwin just for that would be overkill.

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## earl_dc10

would I be able to use PuTTY to print files across the network and things like that, or would I just have to use samba (groan) for that??  my brother suggested that with cygwin you can have all the computers on the network to help compile packages, since my gentoo box is like 700MhZ, sounded good to me. can you do that and can you substitute PuTTY to do the same?? we were trying to use distcc when we discovered we needed cygwin for the windows machine and weren't sure what to expect.

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## PowerFactor

Putty is an ssh/sftp client.  It's a good one but it won't do all your are talking about. It's not a unix application environment like cygwin.

Samba is currently the easiest way to share printers between windows and linux machines.  You can also use the old lpr protocol but you don't need cygiwn for that if you're running win2k or xp.    You can use use a windows box with cygwin as a distcc server. But it comes with all the caveats of normal distcc usage and then some.  Details on that here and here.

Cygwin is very unobtrusive and unlikely to cause problems. And it installs all of its file into it's own directory so it's easy to remove.

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## earl_dc10

thanks for the input guys, you were a real help!

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