Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts:
This package is great! I use it at home. It allows your window system to behave like a Unix system. Lots of Unix command have been ported over as well as lots of Unix programs. It include Xfree86 (a X-Window server) and ssh (secure shell program).
After going the the Cygwin homepage and clicking on the "Install
Cygwin Now" Icon. It will do a few screens and then ask where
you want your Root directory to be, try C:/cygwin
and for your Local Package directory choose
C:/cygwin_download.
The programs are updated fairly often so return to your
C:/cygwin_download directory about once a week and
click on the setup icon and download the latest software.
Sometimes after updating your software and clicking finish a
post install script will run for a few seconds/minutes.
If you have a broadband connection to the school, then you
should try running X Window applications from the school on your
machine.
First go to Cygwin/X
homepage, and read the users guide.
The startxwin.bat discussed in this paragraph is
old and you should search for and use the latest one,
Here is a copy of my startxwin.bat
file (you can find a default version of startxwin.bat in
cygwin/usr/X11R6/bin) Copy the file onto your desktop and it
will become an application icon. Double click on this icon and
a gray window should appear at the upper left of your screen.
To have X tunneling through ssh with enabled X forwarding (-Y
option) with compression (-C option), type into the gray window
ssh -YC your_account_name@some_cs_machine.cs.fsu.edu
An xterm should come up. Use this window for your
connection. All X application started though this window will
display at your machine. (Emacs takes about 2 minutes to finish
creating its window, but after that it works about as fast (but
a little slower) as working at school.
For those without a broadband connection to the school, click on the cygwin icon and use ssh as you are use to.
PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.
You can download a trial license for an X-Window server and an ssh program. (drawback is X-window server must be restarted every 2 hours)