MSYS was created out of a long-lived desire to provide the MinGW community a Minimal SYStem, with which a configure script could be executed in a Windows environment. "Msys is just a native compiled [bash] plus some other native compiled [gnu] tools. . . . The point is there is a minimal [posix]-style command line environment that should just be enough to run configure scripts. Unlike [cygwin] which gives you a full [linux]-style command line and runtime environment. . . . It's a minimal cygwin. . . . The main issue is that the configure result is suitable for [mingw] [gcc] to generate native compiled binaries." A zip file containing msys and mingw can be downloaded here. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10894 The msys and mingw download available above has been tested with current releases of Tcl and Tk. It is the same software available from mingw.org, except that all the needed software has already been packaged into a single download. See [Building Tcl/Tk with Mingw] for info about building Tcl/Tk with Msys and Mingw. More information about msys and mingw can be found here: http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml ---- '''What is MSYS?''' from the site MSYS or Minimal SYStem is a POSIX and Bourne shell environment use with MinGW. It provides a hand picked set of tools to allow a typical configuration script with Bourne syntax to execute. This allows most of the GNU packages to create a Makefile just from executing the typical configure script which can then be used to build the package using the native MinGW version of GCC. The POSIX layer used by MSYS is a fork of the 1.3.3 version of Cygwin. Cygwin is a full POSIX layer and UNIX-like environment for Win32 providing both server and client utilites. For more MSYS-specific information, please see the MSYS section of this website: http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml. ---- [RS]: I've installed msys on W95 and Win XP and like them quite much. Beyond allowing configure/make to pass, it also gives a decent interactive shell (way better than command.com or cmd.exe...) Just some notes: * The msys.bat does quite some voodoo, but on XP I can't get plain black on white text in the console. It helped to just create a link to sh.exe directly. * Most commands I expected are there ([Perl] is not, but I'm not missing that), but du/df aren't. * The alternative shell rxvt.exe looks colorful, but can't run for instance [tclsh] interactively. So sh.exe is still best for me * I have not yet found a way where to put a ~/.bashrc so that it has actual effect on startup (neither in Windows HOME, nor in msys HOME...). Advice very welcome :^) [Duoas] The shell only looks for ~/.profile, AFAIK. Put your configuration there. I've never liked the wonky M icon that comes with MSYS, so I made my own: [http://home.comcast.net/~michaelthomasgreer/msys.ico] ---- '''See also''' * [Building Tcl/Tk with Mingw] * [cygwin] * [MinGW] ---- [Category Porting] - [Category Windows]