Since none of this is really specific to Cygwin/X, I've redirected this thread to the main cygwin list.
I'll take a stab at a few of these, but there are parts I am not sure of either. On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Chris Green wrote: > I had a disk disaster over the week-end, a disk 'optimiser' made my > 160Gb main drive very optimal by wiping it completely. I was fairly > well backed up etc. but it takes a while to get everything back to > normality. > Yep. My 160Gb main drive in a brand new Dell box died in less than a month. I had just got the box up and configured, but I had no backups yet :(. So, I sympathsize. > I found re-installing cygwin and cygwin/X a bit confusing so would > appreciate some comments and help. > > I had all the ftp'ed files left from installing cygwin previously > sitting in a directory on a networded drive, could I have used these > to re-install cygwin rather than downloading everything again? If so, > how does one do it? > Yes. Choose "Install from Local Directory" instead of "Install from Internet", and point setup there. Keep in mind, however, you would have missed out on all the new and exciting updates :). > There are a number of different directories, one for each FTP site I've > used. > This is the part I am not sure how to handle. > As it was I chose an FTP site (the last one I had used I think) and > re-downloaded from there, or did I? If I accept defaults does it just > download only the files which have been updated and install the rest > from the previously downloaded files on disk. > I think it uses the "Local Package Directory" that it prompted you for as a cache. So, I think the answer is yes. > I really find the window where you select what to download, etc. > *very* confusing, some of the wording is very odd. Two examples from > the User's Guide which I find difficult to understand are:- > > You can change setup.exe's view style, which is helpful if you know > the name of a package you want to install but not which category it is > in. Click on the View button and it will rotate between Category (the > default), Full (all packages), and Partial (only packages to be > upgraded). If you are familiar with Unix, you will probably want to at > east glance through the Full listing for your favorite tools. > > So what does 'Partial' mean? I can see that Category means all > packages sorted into types, Full means all in alphabetical order but > what does Partial mean? Does it mean only display packages that I've > got already? > I found it confusing at first too :). No, it is more of a view of what is to come ie. the packages that you or it have selected to upgrade/install. Does that help? > ... and the second (and more confusing for me) bit is:- > > Once you have an existing Cygwin installation, the setup.exe chooser > is also used to manage your Cygwin installation. Information on > installed packages is kept in the /etc/setup/ directory of your Cygwin > installation; if setup.exe cannot find this directory it will act just > like you had no Cygwin installation. If setup.exe finds a newer > version of an installed package available, it will automatically mark > it to be upgraded. To Uninstall, Reinstall, or get the Source for an > existing package, click on Keep to toggle it. Also, to avoid the need > to reboot after upgrading, make sure to close all Cygwin windows and > stop all Cygwin processes before setup.exe begins to install the > upgraded package. > > What on earth does "To Uninstall, Reinstall, or get the Source for an > existing package, click on Keep to toggle it.", mean??? > Did you try it? Clicking on Keep transitions it to Uninstall, Reinstall, Source, etc. -- Brian Ford Senior Realtime Software Engineer VITAL - Visual Simulation Systems FlightSafety International Phone: 314-551-8460 Fax: 314-551-8444 -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
