Re: Angel not present

["Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" <larwe at larwe dot com>]

Hi Fernando,

> > >2) Old versions of Cygwin had a problem with the serial port.  The
> >
> > I have observed this problem with Cygwin 1.1.8, which is the currently
> > downloadable version. It can be alleviated a _little_ by disabling FIFOs on
> > the host-side's serial port. However the debugging link is still very, very
> > fragile, especially in Win9x.
>
>I have never seen this problem on recent Cygwins, but it maybe because I
>use NT4.0 and Win2000.  Cygwin was designed (and it is only officially

I am observing the problem _right now_ on this Win2000 system. It's not a 
Win9x-specific problem, though I surely do know there are many of those.

>My experience with Win9x was disastrous for everything else as well.  I
>had a machine with the MS office stuff plus Quicken and some other off
>the shelf Windows applications.  At least one crash and one reboot a
>day.  Until I gave up and upgraded to NT.

Well, we won't argue OS merits. However I will point out the issue that 
continues to annoy the hell out of me with cygwin and Win9x: I will only 
ever use cygwin for embedded development. So it is an embedded development 
environment. Yet many/most embedded toolchains, ICEs, etc don't work 
properly in NT (including Win2K). So I am left juggling OSs every time I 
want to burn an EPROM and so on. Not supporting Win9x (DOS+Windows type) 
technology in an embedded toolchain is very unfriendly.

If I have to juggle OSs anyway, I may as well juggle to Linux, which works 
about 1000% better for embedded dev than cygwin+NT (it's so much faster on 
builds, much more responsive to interrupts, cheaper, more reliable, roughly 
the same lack of support from embedded hardware vendors,...). So the 
justification for supporting a cygwin that doesn't work properly in 9x is 
pretty thin.

=== Lewin A.R.W. Edwards (Embedded Engineer)
Work: http://www.digi-frame.com/
Personal: http://www.zws.com/ and http://www.larwe.com/

"Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein."