Installation without network connection

Greg Youngdahl gyoungdahl@sbcglobal.net
Tue Dec 27 17:47:00 GMT 2005


Hi all,

	My first message to the list... though I've used cygwin in the past.  I 
searched for answers though I came up with nothing definitive.  Seems 
like it should be a FAQ issue, but it wasn't there.

	My situation is that I have a PC (WinXP), but it does not have any 
network connection (on purpose).  So, I'd like to use my Linux system 
(from where I'm composing and sending this message) to grab an 
appropriate subset of the Cygwin DLL and utilities (at least enough to 
allow me to create my own custom automated backup procedures, using 
something along the lines of piping the output of find into a cpio 
command) and transfer them to the Windows PC for installation.  I saw 
posts that alluded to downloading packages and burning them to a CD, 
which seems like a reasonable way to deal with it, but no particular 
specific information about how to do that (and the posts were several 
years old anyway).

	I saw on the RedHat cygwin page some sort of instructions that seemed 
promising until they had several bold print lines added saying that 
parts of it don't work anymore and/or have been removed from public 
availability, but with nothing about how it should now be done.

	So, can this still be accomplished?  Is there some web page or other 
document that explains how it should be done?  If not - can someone help 
me, and perhaps I can put together such a document?  Perhaps it is 
trivially easy, and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill?  Maybe if I 
could just find a mirror site and download a few things I'd be good to 
go?  If so, what would be a minimum set of files to download (setup.exe, 
the cygwin.dll and enough packages to be able to  have bash run 'find 
<something> | cpio -pd...').

	Secondly, the system of interest (my WinXP box) already has cygwin 
installed (it has been there a while, and I no longer recall how I got 
it there), but it is a 1.3 version of the cygwin.dll, and it doesn't 
have cpio (it seems to have pretty much everything else I'd need), so 
can I just upgrade that, or should I uninstall it and start again from 
scratch?  Perhaps all I really need to do is grab a cpio package and 
install that.  But...

	The perplexing thing about this is that there is a setup.exe (somewhere 
under C:\Windows\system32) that pops up a little window to tell me I 
should use the control panel to do upgrades when I run it from bash 
(typing setup.exe to a bash prompt).  However there is nothing I can see 
in the start->control panel for cygwin, nor anything under add-remove 
programs associated with cygwin.  So, I'm not really even sure if that 
setup.exe is the one associated with cygwin.  Perhaps the method I used 
to install it way back when (potentially 3-4 years ago) did not involve 
the new modern techniques?

	FWIW, running a uname -a from the bash prompt results in:

CYGWIN_NT-5.1 HARRISON 1.3.14(0.62/3/2) 2002-10-24 10:48 i686 unknown

Thanks for any help,
--
Greg Youngdahl

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/



More information about the Cygwin mailing list