Hi everyone!
A thing worked in Cygwin!
Okay, many things work in Cygwin, so that’s a bit unfair. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to be the things that I needed to work in the first 2.5 parts of this series XD. At any rate, I finally got DDRescue-GUI working in most of its glory under Cygwin. This is very a happy moment for me, because it means I should be able to release for Windows. Anyway, without further ado:
Cygwin Part 3: The Video
The Writeup
I got this working a little while ago on a few different systems, and it does also work in 32-bit Cygwin, so 32-bit Windows users won’t be left out either. I did do a little test run before recording to make sure it was still okay :). As you saw, most things worked, with the exception of opening the web browser, collecting disk information, and mounting output files, but the overall experience was quite good. It did freeze up a bit, but that was because the system was busy, as I found out later.
The process is quite simple: start Cygwin as administrator, start the Xwin server, and then start DDRescue-GUI from the terminal. Windows users with Cygwin could actually almost set this up themselves right now. A few modifications to the program are needed, but I’ll be updating the user guide soon to mention this. After starting, DDRescue-GUI runs as usual, except that you have to navigate manually to find your devices. Surprisingly, most things, even in this early preview, work just fine.
Summary
I’m glad this is finally working, and that I was able to demonstrate it at long last. This is confirmed now: DDRescue-GUI is coming to Windows, specifically Windows 7 and later, because older versions are no longer supported by Microsoft. It might be a few releases before it happens, and all the bugs and packaging quirks are sorted out, but it will happen :). I’ll keep you all informed about this. First and foremost, WxFixBoot 3.0.0 will be released, and then a version of GetDevInfo for Cygwin will need to be released, but then this may happen fairly quickly. That’s it from me for now, but I have a good few more posts to come soon, so stay tuned!
Hamish
