Appendix D. Installing Cygwin

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment that runs on top of recent versions of Microsoft Windows, such as 2000 and XP. The Cygwin DLL provides a rich emulation layer, and the Cygwin project provides a large number of ported Linux and Unix applications.

Cygwin is maintained by Cygnus, which is owned by Red Hat. Like all of Red Hat's software, Cygwin is available under several free software licenses, such as the GNU General Public License and the X11 license.