Using FIRE with Cygwin

If you are about to install Cygwin

If you are about to install Cygwin, we strongly advise you to install Cygwin in a directory that has no spaces in it (not in "C:\Program Files" for example, but rather in C:\cygwin). In addition, by default, Cygwin will set your home directory to C:\Documents And Settings\Your User Name\My Documents or something like that. We strongly advise you to change that too, to C:\cygwin\home\yourusername for example. Having spaces in these directories in general will make your Cygwin experience less pleasant (not just for FIRE); Unix does not like spaces in file and directory names.

Once you have installed Cygwin in C:\cygwin, create a /home/yourusername directory. In Cygwin, you can use

mkdir -p /home/yourusername

You can change your home directory by modifying /etc/passwd (I will use the emacs editor here)

emacs /etc/password

I'll explain what you need to modify using an example. My user name is elemento. I replaced the following line:

elemento:unused_by_nt/2000/xp:1003:513:U-GEN-CDT6K81\Olivier Elemento,S-1-5-21-1547161642-602609370-725345543-1003:/cygdrive/c/Documents and Setting/elemento/Desktop:/bin/bash

elemento:unused_by_nt/2000/xp:1003:513:U-GEN-CDT6K81\Olivier Elemento,S-1-5-21-1547161642-602609370-725345543-1003:/home/elemento:/bin/bash

Once you have done that, close the Cygwin terminal, and open a new one.

Required packages for installing and using FIRE in Cygwin

To install and run FIRE in Cygwin, you'll need to install several packages that are not installed by default. They are however easy to install directly from the Web using the setup.exe utility provided with Cygwin. The packages are listed below, per section in setup.exe

In Devel
gcc-core
gcc-g++
make
pcre
pcre-devel

In Perl
perl

In Graphics
Ghostscript
Ghostscript-base

The following packages will also be useful, but are not necessary.

In Archive
unzip (to decompress the FIRE.zip archive)
zip

In Web
wget (to download the FIRE.zip archive)

In Editors
xemacs or vim

Many thanks to Jenny Hsi (Princeton) for contributing to this list of packages.