System Requirements II: Want Cygwin?

This tutorial actually comes in two flavours. The possibilities with the system as well as the installation instructions differ quite a bit depending on whether or not you want to use the Cygwin tools.

For starters, the Cygwin tools are a collection of GNU tools and a DLL which translates Unix-style system calls to native Win32 functions. This adds a POSIX layer on top of Win32 with a look and feel like any run-of-the-mill Unix or Linux. The most prominent change may be that you can use real shells like bash or csh instead of the limited Win32 shells (a.k.a. MS-DOS in Win9x). Shell scripts can simplify almost any complex task that you will be facing in the realm of SGML processing. There are Win32 users who consider the Cygwin Tools as "essential". I strongly encourage you to use the Cygwin tools to simplify SGML processing. However, if you can't stand the Unix way of computing, you will want to stick with the native Win32 version of this tutorial.

This is the version without the Cygwin Tools. If you need the other flavour of this tutorial, visit the SGML for NT homepage.