After finally getting Cygwin installed on my Windows XP Pro SP 2 laptop, I discovered how difficult it can be to get large open-source projects to correctly compile under Cygwin.  This was exteremely irritating for obvious reasons.

So I decided to try and install Ubuntu 8.10 under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.  I had previously installed older versions of Ubuntu this way, but was having some trouble getting 8.10 installed.  After some searching, I found this wonderful post and comment thread.

The short story is, I had to add vga=791 noreplace-paravirt to the grub command line for the initial boot.  Then noreplace-paravirt to /boot/grub/menu.lst after installation and any subsequent updates that modify this file.

I had been trying to get my environment set up to play with Adobe Alchemy, but kept running into problems with my Cygwin setup.  After several frustrating hours of installs, re-installs, uninstalls and some out-of-control Perl threads, I think I've got it ready to go.

The problems I was running into were largely due to two things: 1) The path of my home directory containing spaces ("C:\Documents and Settings\...") and 2) my inexperience with Cygwin.

In regards to #1 above, I think this was causing my home directory (/home/username) to not get created properly.  That meant additional difficulties in customing my environment by editing my .bashrc file.  After the initial learning curve and interpreting the less than specific Adobe Getting Started on Windows instructions for Alchemy, I was able to get the sample library compiled and working correctly.

I did run into a few other problems, but I was able to get through them.  I'll be doing a write up for getting started with Alchemy and Cygwin for Windows users with very little Unix experience when I get some more time.  Of course, now that I've got Cygwin running, I'm hoping to do try out something more significant than Hello World :)