CygWin in windows

[Tony Baechler]

Others have already addressed some of your questions, but since I use it on 
a daily basis, I thought I would throw in my two cents.

On 11/27/2015 2:51 PM, Glenn wrote:
> I want to have access to some of the power of Linux.

First, it's called Cygwin.  Second, it isn't Linux and you'll never have the 
full power, flexibility and accessibility of Linux within any Windows 
environment.  They're apples and oranges.  That said, Cygwin does have lots 
of packages found in most Linux distros and it's a good learning 
environment.  It lets you run bash, compile software, etc without actually 
having to install Linux, but see below.

> I'm most familiar with Debian-based systems.

It's developed by Red Hat, so don't expect Debian commands to work.  It does 
ship dpkg however, so in theory, it could be used as a base for a 
Debian-like Windows environment.  I don't know if it ships apt.  It isn't 
RPM-based.  It uses tar.bz2 for packages.

> I use Jaws, and the CygWin terminal does not automatically read the returned information, and I don't like routing the Jaws cursor to read the terminal.

Try say all.  I use both Window-Eyes and NVDA with reasonable success.  NVDA 
is the far better choice and has the best terminal support of any Windows 
screen reader.  WE is pretty good, but doesn't always read the text on the 
screen and often doesn't read the last line of the display.

> Can SpeakUp be installed into CygWin?


As Gregory said, no.  It's not Linux and doesn't run a Linux kernel.  You 
would need either a virtual machine or a real Linux environment.  I'm 
working on a talking live CD based on Ubuntu which might interest you.  It 
doesn't change anything on your machine but lets you boot a fully working 
Linux system with speech.

The way I use Cygwin is probably not typical.  I have only a minimal system 
consisting of bash, ssh and rsync.  I ssh to my remote servers and do my 
work on them, so I don't need a full Cygwin environment.  There are good 
reasons not to install all available Cygwin packages.  Cygwin ships X, KDE 
and Gnome, but I don't think it ships Orca and I have no idea how accessible 
it is.  If you want a talking X environment which works with Orca, I would 
highly recommend Ubuntu MATE.

You can get a VPS for very cheap.  Linux will almost always run faster than 
the same programs in Windows.  It's possible to do what I do on an almost 
daily basis and ssh to the remote server or VPS, do your work and use rsync 
to download anything you need.  If you have lots of disk space, you can of 
course install a full Cygwin environment, but don't be surprised if it runs 
very slowly compared to Linux.  I haven't used a full Cygwin setup for many 
years, but part of why I abandoned it is because what took 10 minutes in 
Cygwin took 30 seconds in Linux, without exaggeration.  They are constantly 
making improvements though and Cygwin is probably better now.  As it 
happens, I can sell a VPS which fits your needs and budget.  If you're 
interested, please let me know what you're looking for and the price range. 
  As I said, you can get them very cheaply and that still gives you the full 
power of Linux without the hassle of fighting with the very difficult Cygwin 
setup program.