06-22-2003
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Join Date: Sep 2000
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I can't recommend Cygwin, personally (as thehoghunter did).
The power of Linux, Unix etc is in the network capabilities. Cygwin does not give a good flavor of this.
In fact, I downloaded Cygwin this AM and checked and was disappointed. My thoughts were that if someone started with Cygwin they would decided not to use Linux or UNIX.
However, if someone really liked UNIX and Linux and then installed Cygwin, they might find some of the commands useful.
So, my thoughts were that Cygwin is not for beginners, but for experienced users that needed some Linux functionality on their Windows setup.
Lots of nubs like Mandrake Linux because some say it is very easy to install compared to other distros. My recommendation is to start there and experiment.