Cygwin on Vista

By | June 6, 2007

I have been running Vista for a while now and I am just trying to get up to speed with what works and what does not work and why. One thing I use all the time is Poderosa http://en.poderosa.org/ with Cygwin, this gives a great command line tool with full cut and paste options, it is also a great free SSH and Telnet client. However, under Vista this would sometimes work and sometimes not work, but mostly not work. I have so far resisted the urge to turn off UAC (User Access Control), which seems to be what people are saying to do, there are many good reason for not turning it off, as an admin I like to use my machine the same way a normal user would, ie with UAC on. So, I tried something this morning and it seems to be working fine. 

I am posting this to see if anyone has had any luck with Cygwin on
Vista. I realised after trying to get Cygwin to run a few times that
most of the errors it was throwing up were related to file system
access and even running it as admin would not fix that for some reason. I am logged
onto my Vista box with a domain account, so I just gave myself full
control of c:\cygwin, then running Cygwin from inside Poderosa (it does
not work properly outside of Poderosa) seems to work flawlessly ? I have
stopped and started it about 15 times since doing this and it has not
missed a beat, before I did this it simply did not work. Maybe worth a
try ? I will update this in a few days after a bit more testing.

Please let me know what you find to phill #at# hardstaff.com. 

Update : 8 June 2007 : Try this, if you have already installed Cygwin then just delete everything in the directory c:\cygwin then give yourself full control of that directory, then reinstall Cygwin, it should install flawlessly, setup will finish without problems. After I did this then Cygwin runs fine on Vista, as a session in Poderosa and also just the normal Cygwin bash shell work perfectly, and UAC is still on.

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