Subject: Re: Portable Cygwin on a CD
From: <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:46:36 +0100

The contributions over the past few days have helped a lot to make things
clearer, and better. Thank you.

1. There was a suggestion that the CD might usefully start with a
autorun.inf file. I feel a bit nervy about this. Two reasons: a. if the host
machine has Cygwin available then I would be inclined first to investigate
using that version, as the platform for any application I might be
interested in running; b. and if the host machine may even be _running_
Cygwin at the time the CD is inserted, what would be the potential confusion
arising from an autorun script which would be something like "\bin\rxvt -e
/bin/bash --login -i" or whatever?

So the way I've got things set up at the moment is rather meagre on the
automation. But it works (well, I think) as follows:

2. If the host machine does not have Cygwin, then insert the CD and

    Start -> Run -> f:\bin\rxvt {switches}-e /bin/bash --login -i
    mount -bfu f:/ /
    {do stuff}
    umount -A
    ^D

3. If the host machine does have Cygwin, then try starting it up, inserting
the CD, and

    cd f:/usr/local/
    {do stuff}
    ^D

which might work well, or not ...

4. In my case (and maybe others) this doesn't work at all well because when
I attempt to {do stuff}, things are in the wrong place. So instead I start
the host version of Cygwin with the intention of immediately (though
temporarily) disabling it and utilising the CD-bound "local" resource as
follows:

    Start the host version of Cygwin
    mount -m > a:/mount.tmp # or somewhere convenient
    umount -A
    {insert the CD}
    f:/bin/mount -bfu f:/ /
    {do stuff}
    umount -A
    f:/bin/bash a:/mount.tmp # to recover the host setup
    ^D

Personally I do not mind the explicit mount-ing and umount-ing, explicit
references to the CD driveletter f:, etc. Actually the thought of
irretrievably (or even retrievably) hosing the host Cygwin installation is
frightening enough to make this explicit rather mechanical approach
preferable to something automated, however elegant that approach would
undeniably be.

Fergus

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