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Re: Cygwin 1.7 on a FLASH Drive


Ralph Hempel wrote:
Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
Ralph Hempel wrote:
Yes, I've read the FAQ on making Cygwin portable :-)

I'd like to have a complete Cygwin environment on a FLASH
drive, but of course using that drive to compile stuff in
my HOME directory will be awfully slow.

Why is that?

Creating, wand writing files is much slower on a FLASH drive than on a hard disk. Not a big problem for a few files here and there, but if I'm compiling gcc and binutils for cross compiling to an ARM (for example) it might be MUCH slower.

How is it hooked up to your system? Generally speaking, you should get better performance from flash memory than disks unless something is getting in the way.

Is there a way to create a symlink of a directory on a local
hard drive to the cygwin /home/username/ directory?

No, not across volumes. You could try 'junction', which does something "similar" in Windows land.

Just similar enough to be dangerous from what I hear...

Treating junctions as symlinks (for directories) is dangerous, yes. There's also no visible indication of a junction point, unlike symlinks.

Are there any features in 1.7 that will make a portable
cygwin easier to maintain?

There will be no mount table in the registry.

This is, of course, very good.


Now that I think about it, one way that having a common Cygwin install
will help me is on my development laptop. I'm running XP as the host
OS and have a lot of virtual Win2K machines set up for testing in
clean sandboxes.

By having one canonical "known good" Cygwin install that's visible
as a shared drive to the virtual machines, I think I can get
what I want without using a USB drive.

Sorry for the noise, just musing aloud I guess...

While it is possible to use a shared drive as an installation for Cygwin, that can be slower due to network latencies on the shared "drive".


-- Larry Hall http://www.rfk.com RFK Partners, Inc. (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office 216 Dalton Rd. (508) 893-9889 - FAX Holliston, MA 01746

_____________________________________________________________________

A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
>> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
>>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?

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