Where can I download an offline installer of Cygwin?

Question

I need an offline installer with most of the utilities commonly needed. Somehow the default installer confuses me with all its package selection. I installed Cygwin but I can\'t

Answer 1

Install Babun instead -> https://babun.github.io/index.html It contains Cygwin ;)

Answer 2

I'm not a big fan of Cygwin. It is good if you have some Unix code that requires a full POSIX system, I suppose. Even then, using it renders your programs GPL (due to the GPLed DLL), unless you pay Red Hat for a different license.

Most people should be using MinGW (and MSYS) instead. This gives you the Unix shell and utilities (even compilers, if you want them) without the purposely infectious DLL. Most of the folks using GNU compilers on Windows are using MinGW (although some don't realise it).

Just as importantly for your purposes, you can download the parts separately, rather than use the re-downloading installer.

The SourceForge download page is here. I'd suggest starting with the MSYS Base System package, which will give you the coreutils, Bash, make, tar, etc. If there's other stuff you need, you can pick and choose from the list of packages.

Answer 3

If all you want is the UNIX command line tools I'd suggest not installing Cygwin. Cygwin wants to turn your Windows PC into a UNIX Workstation which is why it likes to install all its packages.

Have a look at GnuWin32 instead. It's Windows ports of the command line tools and nothing else. Here is the installer for the GnuWin32 diff.exe. There are offline installers for all the common tools.

(You asked for offline installers but in case you ever want one later there is a tool which will download and install everything for you.)

Method 2: make an offline install zip file for cygwin.

Don't mess with saving packages because the installed directory for cygwin can be canned in a zip file and expanded whenever you need it on any computer.

1. Download Cygwin installer

2. pick packages you want installed from gui.

3. hit install and wait a really long time for everything to download.

4. zip up the C:\Cygwin folder. Now you have your offline zip file for installing cygwin on any machine.

5. Unzip this file on whatever computer you like. set cmd.exe paths appropriately to point to cygwin bin directory under windows control panel.

Answer 4

You can download from below link. ftp://ftp.comtrol.com/dev_mstr/sdk/other/1800136.tar.gz After downloading just extract the image and install.

Answer 5

Not a direct answer to your question, but you can get the most commonly used utilities from http://www.mingw.org/ without having to jump through the hoops with that horrible Cygwin installer.

Here is a slightly more informative link http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cobcurses/index.php?title=Install-MSYS.