Serious Installation problems - possible workround but rapid fix required.

["John Macallister" <j dot macallister1 at physics dot ox dot ac dot uk>]

I've installed Cygwin a few times before and I was fairly confident of
installing version 1.5.12 but what a disaster this distribution is! I
don't want anyone in particular to feel they're the object of criticism
but this release may put off many users from trying to use Cygwin at all
because it's just not possible to install it without a great deal of
trouble with the current distribution kit. I would suggest a rapid
re-release is needed (I'm willing to field test it for you as far as the
installation procedure is concerned) before too many people discover the
problem!

I've tried downloading and/or installing directly from 16 different
download sites just in case there was a problem mirroring. Some sites
failed with installation incomplete (consistently e.g. mirror.ac.uk) but
most ended up in some sort of endless shell loop at 90+% of the way
through with virtual memory increasing endlessly: even setting a
pagefile size of 2.5GB was not enough!

Here's what I did.
 (1) Download from rcn.net 
       (This just happens to be the one that worked but all the
successful downloads looked identical).
 (2) Install from local disk using "Install" for everything.
       This produced some "missing database" errors and didn't complete
properly. I just cancelled the "Try again?" request.
 (3) Install again from local disk using "Reinstall" for everything.
        This produced many errors about "missing cygz.dll". It
eventually completed and produced a desktop icon,etc.
        However almost nothing worked because of the missing cygz.dll.
 (4) Install again using "Default" for everything but "Install" for X11.
(By this time I had read some of the mailing lists!)
        The installation completed without error.
        Everything I use appears to work and I now have a working
version of 1.5.12.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

 John 
 

Name: John B. Macallister  E-mail: j.macallister1@physics.ox.ac.uk
Post: Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH,UK
Phone: +44-1865-273388 (direct)  273333 (reception)  273418 (Fax)


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