Using Ecolab under Cygwin

Cygwin is a port of the GNU development environment to 32 bit Windows (Windows 95/98/ME and Windows NT/2000/XP). As such, it provides as near to Posix like environment as is possible in Windows. There are a few hints needed to get Ecolab compiled and running under Cygwin.

• Install the whole Cygwin distribution if possible. Required packages are bash, binutils, cygwin, diff, fileutils, findutils, gcc, grep, gzip, make, tar, textutils, w32api, X-windows, zlib.
• Install the prebuilt Tcl/Tk/BLT software stack available from SourceFirge).

     cd /
     tar zxvf /tmp/tcltkblt-cygwin.tar.gz
  

• Optionally install the PRNG/UNURAN libraries
• Unpack Ecolab and do make in top level directory.

Eco Lab must be used under X11 on Cygwin. To start the X11 server, type ``startx'' at the Cygwin console. X11 programs run under this server appear to be running natively under Windows -- its quite neat!

Once the X server has started, it will pop another shell window from which you can run Xwindows programs. cd to the models directory, and run the example ecolab script as ./ecolab ecolab.tcl. The #! mechanism does not work with Cygwin!