[news.eclipse.platform] Re: Question about running Eclipse on cygwin???

[Alex Blewitt <automatic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cygwin is *not* a Linux emulator. It's a set of DLLs that provide POSIX compatibility for programs compiled to use them. This includes (amongst other things) Bash and hooks for a file system to make it look like Unix paths, but at the end of the day they're all Windows executables (bash.exe, for example).

What you're asking is whether it's possible to run Eclipse on windows in an X windows environment. The answer is almost certainly not. The UI stuff sits on top of SWT, which is platform/os/windowing system specific. Under windows, it uses win32.win32.x86, for example (though the second win32 is actually a synonym for the Microsoft Foundation Classes, or .Net, or whatever the windowing system is).

What you'd have to do is to build your own custom SWT classes, and target it for win32.motif.x86, in much the same way that there's a linux.motif.x86 build. You should start from the linux motif binaries, and adapt as necessary to get the DLLs to build under cygwin. Once you've done that, you may need to change some definitions in the Java plugin itself to change 'linux' to 'win32', just so that the two plugins are different. 

You will then need to start eclipse with eclipse -ws motif -os win32 -arch x86

Given that this has never been done before (to my knowledge) you're going to run into a *lot* of problems. But mountains are there to climb, none the less. That's the rough set of steps that you'd need to do to achieve this goal.

I can't give you any help, since I have to use Windows but choose to use Mac OS X. I definitely wouldn't choose X windows :-)

Good luck,

Alex.