CyGNOME - Cygwin GNOME

CyGNOME = Cygwin + GNOME

Project Goal

The Cygwin GNOME project aims to port the GNOME desktop to Windows OS, using Cygwin as a porting tool and user environment.

This project is based on the Cygwin GNOME patches contributed by Steven O'Brien. Without his great work (and some others' efforts), this project won't come to reality. We also had some additional applications ported to Cygwin.

To make maximum use of the power of Cygwin and Cygwin/X (together with the libraries and applications already ported to Cygwin), currently we have no plan to make any effort toward the native Windows UI. Please visit http://www.gimp.org/win32 for some info regarding that aspect. And gtk2 on Cygwin also have got Win32 UI port of gtk2 and some other libraries.

Some complain that projects like CyGNOME is preventing 'Windows users' from 'converting' to *NIX. This is not true, we belive it is the other way. To clear these doubt please see article by Joshua Lokken an answer to those who complained about KDE-Cygwin (a similar project, more KDE users comments, more KDE-Cygwin Press Articles).

Ports Available

GNOME Desktop 1.4
Development tools: Anjua-1.0.1, DevHelp-0.5, Glade-0.65, PyGTK/PyGNOME-1.4.1
GIMP 1.2
Gnumeric 1.09
Some additional appliations: Sylpheed/Sylpheed-Claws, dillo, gFTP, gvim, gaim, bluefish, gqview, gtktalog, etc, etc.

See Application Pages for detail status.

Cygwin GNOME 2.x

One year passed since the first time Steven O'Brien published his great works. Currently the core libraries and core desktop programs of GNOME 1.4 are almost done. Thus we started Cygwin GNOME 2.x as a new project a few days ago.

Porting GNOME to Cygwin

Steven O'Brien's Cygwin GNOME patches

As mentioned above, this project currently is based on the Cygwin GNOME patches contributed by Steven O'Brien [steven.obrien2 at ntlworld dot com]. It is a DLL approach to port GNOME to Cygwin. Please visit http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steven.obrien2 for detailed info.

Now it seems that Steven O'Brien's site is offline. Thus we put a backup of his patches here.

Some other efforts on porting GNOME to Cygwin:

Cygwin + GNOME: http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/1596/en/cygwin.html
This site maintains a list of tips on compiling GNOME libraries and applications.

Eric Lassauge's Cygwin/XFree86 contributions: http://lassauge.free.fr/cygwin/
There are some statically linked libs and apps, along with xscreensaver, xlockmore etc.

Other Cygwin ports:

KDE-Cygwin The KDE on Cygwin project is simliar to CyGNOME, which aims to enable the KDE (The K Desktop Environment) on Windows OS based on Cygwin ( the posix emulation layer for Windows), the xfree86 server and the qt library (qtlib). It was started a long time ago, and have already successfully ported QT1/KDE1, QT2/KDE2 and QT3 to Cygwin. Now it is obsessed with Win32 native port of QT.
Home page : http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/

gtk2 on Cygwin: Web site by Masahiro Sakai [s01397ms at sfc.keio.ac.jp] offering gtk2 binaries and patches for cygwin, this include pango, ruby etc.

Other approaches to port GTK+ application to Windows

GIMP (and GTK+) for Win32: Win32 native support of GTK+ (mainly 2.x), supported by Tor Lillqvist (tml), using MS VC or MinGW as compiler. Their work is integrated with the mainline gnome development. And many GTK+ based applications use it to provide their Win32 port, such as GIMP, Sylpheed-Claws, Gaim, etc.