My Geek Notes

My biggest annoyance with Windows - no terminal/shell

May 3rd, 2007 – hallamigo

I’ve been using Linux (Slackware w/ Fluxbox) as my primary desktop OS for the last couple of years and continue to tweak it to perfection adding or modifying apps. I’ve done the same thing with my Windows (XP Professional) laptop over the same time period as I use both Linux and Windows for work in testing how websites render across browsers and platforms.

This last week I’ve been looking into a solution to my number one annoyance with Windows - the lack of a decent terminal/shell app. The command prompt doesn’t even come close to what I can do with Aterm or Xterm on my Linux box. When I SSH onto a server I can use Putty, sure, but even that is lacking in the stylistic options.

The solution - Cygwin. I printed the 66 page manual with the intention of tweaking it to do what I need, but my primary reason for installing it was to get Xterm and OpenSSH installed so I can finally have a decent terminal/shell app on Windows. The initial install does not include either Xterm or OpenSSH, but has a lot of the other core tools for Linux. Here’s the simple set of steps I used to do the install.

Go to http://www.cygwin.com/ and download the setup.exe file (the “Install or update now!” link).

Run the setup.exe file and walk through the wizard - I left everything default except for the “Download Site” where I chose ftp://mirrors.xmission.com because it’s the closest one to my location.

On the select packages step expand the “Net” section and click on “openssh: The OpenSSH server and client programs” (it will select other required packages for you like “openssl: The OpenSSL runtime environment” right below it along with any others in other sections).

Also, on the select packages step expand the “X11″ section and click on “xterm: Xterm - X terminal” (again, it will select other required packages for you).

Click Next to proceed.

On the last step check the 2 boxes to “Create icon on Desktop” and “Add icon to Start Menu”.

You should now have a Cygwin shortcut icon on your desktop, clicking it will bring up a command prompt and create some default files then put you at the prompt line for your input.

type startx at the prompt, hit enter, this will open up the xterm window where you can type ssh blah, blah, blah.

Any time you want to install other apps, just run the setup.exe file again and add or remove your apps - super easy!

I’ll be adding some more tweak instructions as I work my way through the manual and install some more of the apps that are available. There is even the option of getting Gnome and KDE working under Cygwin - check out those options with the following links.