Nemes <hyperion.nemes <at> gmail.com> writes: > hello all > > New to lthe mailing list, and new to cygwin :) > > Firstly I would to ask if it is normal for cygwin to startup and just > show a cmd.exe black window as the access to the install?? > > From there I did a, "startx" and was surprised to just get another > bash shell window I presume.
But this bash shell is running in a X window. You would need an X Window to run X applications. Do you have X applications that you need to use? The main reason I have cygwin installed is to have access to a power command line environment. I don't need an X window for this. Although cygwin does provide an X environment, it does not really offer a complete suite of X applications. You can browse the X11 category of the setup program to see what X applications cygwin provides. You'll see that WindowMaker, fvwm and xwinwm are there, along with a nestful of core applications. But it is not an overflowing repository of X/KDE/GNOME applications. I think the main reason to run cygwin is for the command line and to have access to X applications that run on real *nix boxes. When you say you want to learn "Linux", what do you really mean? You would like to learn some Linux applications? Many Linux applications have Windows versions (eg, Firefox, Open Office, etc). Maybe you would like to start with those. You would like to learn the command line? That's a good idea. The command line is very powerful and is an important part of mastering Linux. You would like to learn a Linux desktop environment? I'm not sure that this is really necessary. If you were able to migrate from Windows 95 to Windows XP, you can migrate to KDE or GNOME. I'm not sure its necessary to install it on top of cygwin on top of Windows to get practice with it. Go check out TheOpenCD project http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/ . Once you've replaced every windows application that you use with open source (but native windows) varieties, then you can think about switching your desktop environment. -- 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/
