ADF 2004.01 and Cygwin

Cygwin is no longer needed for ADF to work; moreover it will cause problems if Cygwin binaries are executed from within ADF and/or MinGW programs. MinGW is a Windows port of Unix utilities and Msys is a subset of it provided with ADF for convenience. It is necessary for ADF to work and it replaces Cygwin needed in the previous versions of ADF (version 2003.01 and earlier). If you have Cygwin installed on your computer, make sure that its binary files folder is placed after Msys folder in the PATH environment variable (normally the ADF Setup program takes care of this).

Do not run ADF from Cygwin programs (Emacs, xterm, etc.). Cygwin adds /cygdrive/ to pathnames in some of the important environment variables, including PATH, which prevents some non-Cygwin programs, including ADF, executed from inside Cygwin from working properly.

If you would like to keep using Cygwin in parallel with ADF you have a choice depending on your personal preferences. If you prefer to work from Unix shell command line, then you can create a shortcut for C:\ADF2004.01\msys\bin\sh.exe and place it on the desktop. You can then use it instead of Cygwin's shell to run ADF programs. However, if you prefer to use Windows native tools, i.e. Windows Explorer and alike, you can, using an editor of your choice, create a shell script that executes ADF; save the script with .run extension and execute it by double-clicking in the Windows Explorer (ADF Installation procedure associates files with .run extension with C:\ADF2004.01\msys\bin\sh.exe).

If you want to know more about MinGW and Msys, visit their website.