Re: Win32 port of Debian ?
"Brimhall, GeoffreyX L" <geoffreyx.l.brimhall@intel.com> writes:
> I remember seeing a few months back someone hinting at starting a win32 port
> of Debian, that would be built on top of the cygwin posix emulator for
> windows.
>
> Was a group ever formed to begin this task ? If so, I would like to find out
> more info on helping out the group.
>
> If not, what were the issues ? Not enough people wanted to do this, or it
> did not fit into the framework of the debian ports ? Or is the cygwin posix
> emulator not quite ready for a full port ?
>
> The reason I'm wondering about this is I was interested in porting the
> libggi on top of DirectX, and the easiest way I could think of to do this
> was to use the cygwin posix emulator. In attempting to kick off building
> libggi, I quickly found myself wanting and building handy unix shell tools.
> Then I though, "Well, this is the beginnings of a linux port". Finally, I
> had the realization that if libggi is ported, then the Xggi-server (which is
> a full-blown X server) should be able to port which would make a very nice
> full blown free-ware X server for MS windows.
>
> And if there is an X-server and a linux port, then cool apps like the Gimp,
> X-emacs, to KOffice could run on a windows platform (and I could work on my
> linux apps at work when I have a touch of free time).
Well, the port has been an idea for at least a year - unfortunately, I
haven't had enough time to get very far on it.
There is a win32@lists.debian.org mailing list set up for discussing
the port.
There certainly seems to be most of the elements needed to do a
partial Debian port to the cygwin environment. I know egcs, binutils,
most of the base stuff, ncurses, xlib, and perl do work with cygwin.
That's most of the tricky stuff.
I have gotten dpkg-deb compiled for cygwin - but I haven't tackled the
rest of dpkg yet. The next step was to make binary packages out of
all the programs from the Cygnus binaries - that way we could replace
the packages with ones compiled from source in a piecemeal manner.
I've got the scripts half written to do that - I just ran out of time
to finish the job off properly.
Cheers,
- Jim
Reply to: