The installation of the tools depend on the platform you use:
All the tools required are usually installed on a UNIX developer machine.
If a tool is not already installed on your system, you will typically use the installation package from your distribution.
If an install package is not available, or you have a reason not to use it (maybe because it's simply too old), you can install that tool from source code. The following sections will provide you with the webpage addresses where you can get these sources.
The native tools will typically be a bit faster, but more complicated to
install. You will have to download a lot of tools from different webpages,
and install them in the ways they have to be installed. The default
installation location will typically not be the
C:\Program Files
folder. Have a look at
Section 2.3, “Win32: Recommended tools” for an overview of the
recommended tools.
Installation of the Cygwin tools is very simple. As Cygwin uses an
UNIX emulation layer,
it might be a bit slower compared to the native tools, but at an
acceptable level. All tools will be installed into one base folder, the
default is C:\cygwin
.
Cygwin provides a UNIX emulation layer with a lot of UNIX based tools on the Win32 platform. Although Cygwin consists of several seperate packages, the installation and update is done through a single setup.exe, which acts similar to other web based installers.
You will find this network based setup.exe at: http://www.cygwin.com/. Click on one of the "Install Cygwin now" appearances. This will start the download of the setup.exe.
After the download completed, start this setup.exe on your machine. It will ask you for some settings, the defaults should usually work well. The setup will then download and install a basic set of packages.
Under: "Start -> Programs -> Cygwin -> Cygwin Bash Shell" you should now be able to start a new Cygwin bash shell, which is similar to the command line (command.exe/cmd.exe) in Win32, but much more powerful.
If you want to add additional, update installed or remove packages, you should start the setup.exe again. At the "Select Packages" page, the entry in the "New" column will control what is done (or not) with the package. If a new version of a package is available, the new version number will be displayed, so it will be automatically updated. You can change the current setting by simply clicking at it, it will change between:
a specific version number - this different package version will be installed
Skip - not installed, no changes
Keep - already installed, no changes
Uninstall - uninstall this package
Reinstall - reinstall this package