Rootless on Cygwin

From GoboLinux Knowledge Base

Contents 1 Basic Concepts 2 Dependencies 3 Install 4 Other Programs

[edit] Basic Concepts

The most important thing to remember with Cygwin is that it is basically a cross compilation kit. This means that it provides a Unixy interface to the otherwise unaltered Windows OS. As a result the binaries it compiles and uses are Windows (.exe). The main consequence of this is that none of the binary packages that contain compiled binaries will work. More below...

[edit] Dependencies

Almost all *nix distros (including Mac OS X) contain a standard set of tools, but Cygwin does not. Here are some programs which Gobo assumes are present and needs to function; make sure you have installed then in Cygwin.

• mtail - Necessary for Gobo's make to work
• python - Compile is essentially a python program
• wget - used by Compile and InstallPackage to fetch recipes and packages

[edit] Install

The instructions are very clear, and mostly work, however the Scripts package now contains compiled C code, so once the CreateRootlessEnvironment has run, you do not have a working system.

• Using your favorite text editor, create the file /usr/include/linux/kdev_t.h. It should contain the following:

#ifndef _LINUX_KDEV_T_H
#define _LINUX_KDEV_T_H
#define MAJOR(dev)      ((dev)>>8)
#define MINOR(dev)      ((dev) & 0xff)
#define MKDEV(ma,mi)    ((ma)<<8 | (mi))
#endif

• Go to Programs/Scripts/Current/src
• run make
• You will suddenly have a bunch of .exe files in the directory. My brute force method was to go to

../bin and remove all the files with the same name. e.g. LinkOrExpand, IsExecutable, SuperUserName, usleep

• Then copy the .exe versions over to ../bin
• Rerun SymlinkProgram Scripts (This would have failed before because of an unusable binary)
• Done - if you have installed any other programs at this point, you will need to rerun SymlinkProgram for them as well.

You can InstallPackage Compile because at this point there is no compiled code in it (but that is why Python must be installed)

[edit] Other Programs

I haven't much info on this except I cannot get OpenSSL to compile at the moment, but I am working on it. As a result the Apache menu needs to be adjusted and the ssl config option commented out (just put a # in front of it)

More forthcoming when I get to it.