We have written about Cygwin in past articles. This article will focus on getting Xterm to run on Windows. Xterm emulation works. Resize during a session? No problem. Unix style cut and pastes? Sure. The catch is you have to run X on your Windows box… heh, heh. First, install Cygwin, then copy the binaries for XFree86 into a directory. From a Cygwin Bash prompt, go into that directory. On Cygwin, you can go:

cd /cygdrive/c/xfreeinstallfiles

to navigate your Windows filesystem. Next, you need to extract extract:

$ gzip -d extr*.gz

Now, run the Xinstall program:

$ sh Xinstall.sh

We answered most everything with the default; however, we did add the terminfo entries, and we didn’t install postscript or Japanese documentation. Now, you need to install the start scripts:

$ cd /usr/X11R6/bin
$ cp /cygdrive/c/xfreeinstallfiles/startup-sc* ./
$ tar -xzf star*.tgz

Now, you could go ahead and just do:

$ sh startxwin.sh

and X will start up. But it is just twm, and it is ugly. Much nicer is a version of IceWM for Cygwin available here. The instructions for installation are perfect. To add the path, simply add:

:/usr/local/bin

to the end of the path statement on the top of startxwin.sh. One other thing that we found was that the win95 theme worked much better for us, so intead of twm, you want:

icewm -t win95 &

The colors for Xterm are still not so nice. Assuming that .Xdefaults doesn’t exist in your home directory, you can copy this file to your home directory as .Xdefaults and your colors will be nicer. Just run startxwin.sh to bring up IceWM, and you are ready to Bash away with your mighty Xterms. Run top on a *nix box and giggle with glee as you resize the box and see more processes. Of course, there are some other cool things you can do, now that you have a full X window manager running on your Windows workstation.