Cygwin

Topic(s): me,computers
2005-09-27 00:39:41 PDT

Apologies go out to my readers. I haven't posted for an entire month! Almost everyday I intend to post, but then it's midnight, 1am, 2am before I know it, and I prefer sleep over posting. Going forward I hope to be more frequent in my postings.

So much has happened, I can't even begin to remember it all. In no particular order:

I seem to recall some problems with hurricanes... perhaps those of you on the Gulf Coast can fill me in.

Football season has started. Texas is ranked second.

I have a girlfriend.

I own a house.

Boomtown is only four hours away.

Cache Creek is only ninety minutes away.

My girlfriend may have a gambling problem. But I'm ok with it because she always wins.

I may have a gambling problem. I lose mostly. But I'll win it back next time.

The United States is going back to the moon.

The third tourist is going to the International Space Station.

We've launched yet another probe to Mars.

I bought a sweet bicycle for 50% off.

A new semester has begun at ATLAS adult literacy. I have a new student. She's from Hankou, China.

An acquaintance of mine is having his videos shown at this year's ResFest. Unfortunately I was twenty minutes late to the showing here in San Francisco and missed his first three videos.

I ordered a plain hamburger at In-n-Out. They gave me three slices of cheese. That's all. No meat.

Some things never change. I hate Windows.

I installed Cygwin on top of XP on my laptop. Cygwin is a Linux emulator. It gives the look and feel of Linux even though it's a Windows machine. The coolest part is it integrates nicely with other Linux machines - shell scripts work, as does mounting remote file systems. To the right (and possibly above) is a small screen capture of my Cygwin desktop.

Running in the white window is OpenOffice (a Microsoft Office clone that costs exactly zero dollars), and in the small black window is the Linux command line.

I've got X running under Cygwin, and have remotely logged into a Linux system. The remote Linux system has OpenOffice, FireFox, and all the applications any Windows user would be accustomed to (except they're free). That is, the window manager is running locally under Cygwin, OpenOffice is running on the remote Linux system, but the display is present on my local machine.

I can't count the number of times I've said "no way!!!" under my breath. This is so cool. I've got the power of a simple Linux machine locally, and the power of a complex Linux machine remotely. Both integrate seamlessly to make my machine feel like it is one powerful, fast machine. Sometimes I almost forget I'm running on top of XP.

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