Re: Installing Cygwin

[Warren Young <warren at etr-usa dot com>]

David Dews wrote:
> What Cygwin files do I need to download to simply get "make", "gcc" and "gdb" to
> work on the command line?  

Create a new folder, put setup.exe in that, then set up Cygwin on that 
machine to your liking.  You will end up with a folder containing 
setup.exe and a directory named after the Cygwin mirror you downloaded 
from, containing the packages you downloaded and setup.ini.

You can then move that entire tree to the other machine using, say, a 
CD-R or USB stick.  When you run setup.exe there, say "Install from 
Local Directory" instead of "Install from Internet".  Make the same 
package selections on the next screen, and you will get the same setup 
as on the machine you downloaded from.

To update this non-connected copy of Cygwin, simply update Cygwin on the 
Internet-connected machine, then copy the setup.exe-and-packages tree 
back over to the disconnected one, in the same place as before.  Run 
setup.exe again, and just click through, accepting all the defaults to 
update your packages.  (The second time through, setup.exe knows what 
packages you have installed, so you don't have to re-select them.)

It's not necessary that the connected and disconnected machines have the 
same package sets.  It's only necessary that this merged download tree 
contain a superset of the packages required on all machines that use it. 
 So, if you have multiple installation profiles, you can build up a 
merged download tree containing the superset of packages that all of 
your profiles require, selecting just the packages you need on each 
given machine you install on.

At work, we get this behavior simply by putting setup.exe and the 
download sub-folder on a shared network drive, which everyone just 
installs from, so that each updated package gets downloaded from the 
mirrors just once.